


The Mora Academy for Future Defenders of the Known World

by AuntyAgonee



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: AU, Aged-down, Gore, Kinda, Kittens for everyone, Mentions of Arson, Swedish ponytails, because Emil, coming-of-age story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-05-17 04:06:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 45,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5853457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 0086. The Silent World seethes with the cries of the sick and the dead, and the Known World is going through a desperate shortage of troops.<br/>In response to a nations-wide appeal for more parents to enrol their children as defenders of the Known World, a certain pack of four are submitted to the Academy; Emil, the reluctant arsonist, Lalli, the mage who shuns human company, Reynir, the other mage who can't get enough human company, and Tuuri, the jack-of-all-trades.<br/>Their teachers (the favourites of which are Mikkel and Sigrun, who probably shouldn't be trusted around children) can only prepare them for the battle that awaits them.<br/>The battle to reclaim the Silent World. As well as small personal battles, such as getting Lalli to stop having his hairballs on the carpet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Enrollment

**Author's Note:**

> It was about time I made a more significant contribution to the fandom, so here it is. A small saga concerning the alternate lives of everyone's favourite Cat Man and Co.  
> You'll notice me dodging around the names of siblings and parents, for obvious reasons, and I'll try to keep the cast small so we don't get distracted by too many OC's. For the most part, it will just be a nice, friendshippy, wild little ride for our heroes.
> 
> Except there will be cats. Lots and lots of cats. I have two kittens and now everything I write must involve excessive amounts of cats.

(Year 86, Östersund Sweden)

Two months before he turns fifteen years old, Emil Västerström is sat down at the kitchen table in his home in Östersund by his parents. He can already tell from the looks on their faces that he will not like the news they are about to deliver.

Still, when it comes, he cannot stifle his cry of outrage and surprise.

“Oh don’t fuss so, Emil, you’ll love it.” says his mother, flapping her hand dismissively “Siv and Torbjörn are right around the corner, and all of your little cousins.”

“I won’t love it!” he objects “I’ll hate it and you know it.”

“Now, son, this is for your own good.” his father is clearly trying to play the role of the calm, reasonable parent in this situation, which is pretty damned rich.

Just last night he was the one blowing his top at Emil for not diving head-first into the family business of being a rich poof- or whatever the hell it is his family is supposed to do- and picking Cleansing as his preferred career choice when he was asked at his school.  
And now his parents are packing him off to an academy designed to do exactly that? To make a hardened Cleanser of the only child in this generation of the Västerström family when he should be learning to be a rich poof? Something weird is going on here, and Emil doesn’t like it, whatever it is. 

So in a sudden turn of events he has found himself arguing against the exact life-path he would have chosen for himself, if his parents planned to give him a choice.

His mother continues “It’ll be nice. You’ll see! You can see your uncle and aunt on the weekends and come back here for the summer break and the solstices, and in the mean time you can learn exactly what you want to learn.”

He narrows his eyes at her “I know you’re punishing me for something. I just don’t know what it is.”

“Be reasonable son-” starts his father, but his mother silences him with a wave of her painted fingers.

For a moment, she and her son stare each other down in a thick silence. Their eyes are an identical blue, and it would seem that the younger Västerström also inherited the stormy glare his mother is trying to use to intimidate him into unquestioning submission.

The father clears his throat uncomfortably “Emil, please don’t argue with your mother.”

“It’s that fucking rumour, isn’t it?”

“Emil!” flutters his father “There is no call for that language at all!”

“Oh, let him cuss as much as he wants, dear. It’s not going to do a thing for him now, is it?”

Emil stands up and slams his palms on the polished table “I am not a fucking arsonist!”

His mother copies his gesture “The Hel you aren’t! What are we supposed to think, the old barn just burnt itself down? What kinds of fools do you take your parents for, Emil? Everyone in town knows what a little firebug you are!”

“I set fire to the bathroom, once! With a knocked-over candle! That’s hardly a calculated crime, Mother!”

“Well it’s hardly innocent on your part when the old barn just happens to go up on the same day we find a stash of lighters under your bed, is it?”

His face flushes red. That little stash he can’t explain, beyond the fact that he just really likes watching the little flame spark into life with a flick of his finger. It would be almost like magic, if the stuff existed.

His mother draws back with a smug look on her face “That’s what I thought. Go get started on your packing. You’re leaving at the end of the week.”

He glowers “You just want me out of the house, don’t you?”

“No, no of course not!” assures his father, then, shooting an uncertain look at his mother, he adds “Do we, honey?”

“We want you somewhere your firebug tendencies will be put to use for the good of the living world,” says his mother with an air of finality “Now go to your room and get started on your packing this instant, young man.”

Emil doesn’t need to be told twice. He springs out of the room with the grace of an elk and shoots up the stairs, letting out an impressive roar of rage all the way up. His voice has only recently settled into the deeper tones of adult-hood, so the roar breaks a few times into a squeaky trill, which is still equally infuriated.

“Don’t slam your door!” shouts his mother after him.

“We love you!” adds his father.

Emil’s bedroom door slams.

 

(Year 86, Keuruu Finland) 

“Lalli, come on. You knew this was coming.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” responds the muffled voice from the top of the pantry.

Onni Hotakainen stands at the bottom of the pantry, looking up past crates of fresh produce and strips of hanging, cured meat at the fragment of his cousin that he can see. A single hand, gripping the edge of the topmost shelf, between two slim boxes of oats. The gods only know how Lalli got up there without disturbing the contents of the shelves, but he somehow managed it, and hid from Onni for the better part of the day.

Lalli might have gone undisturbed for the entire day had the cook not found a pair of lynx-like eyes peering out at him in the dark, when he went into the pantry for some spices. His scream of “COUGAR IN THE PANTRY!” alerted Onni to his cousin’s presence.

Now, he stands inside the pantry as the kitchen staff bustle about, preparing dinner for the base, and casting the strange and pitying looks at Onni as he stretches his diplomatic abilities to their limit. Honestly, it has taken most of his willpower so far not to climb up the shelves and grab Lalli by the legs, fling the little twig of a teenager over his shoulder and carry him off to the Sweden-bound boat a few days early.

But, somehow, Onni resists the compulsion.

“You don’t need to like it, you just need to recognise your responsibility. To the family, Lalli, and to yourself to be the best mage you can be.”

He grunts.

“Come on, I can’t finish your training by myself! You’re not an easy student, you know, and I’m not a very good teacher. This is the best thing for the family.”

Another grunt. This time, the fingers twitch a little.

“Lalli, please just be reasonable about this. You don’t want to stay in Keuruu for the rest of your life, do you?”

One of the chefs stops in mid-knife-swing to glare at Onni.  
“What’s so wrong with Keuruu?” she demands.

The chef next to her elbows her sharply in the ribs and mutters for her to go back to cutting her carrots.

Onni is acutely aware of the increasing tension. These chefs really want the skinny kid to have his tantrum somewhere else, and for his fat cousin to get the hell out of the aisle so they don’t have to dodge around him every time they need something from the spice-rack or pantry.

He speaks through gritted teeth “Tuuri is there. She’s excited to know you’ll be joining her.”

“In prison.”

“In the school,” he finishes “And she thinks it’s going to be good for you to get out there and meet people.”

“Why? I don’t want to.”

“Well fucking tough, Lalli. You’ve got to realise you live in a world that has other people in it. You can’t just go off and live in the mountains like some weird hermit.”

This is enough to get him to peer over the edge. A pair of grey eyes glint at him, their disgust and irritation obvious “Like you?”

“Ok, that’s it.”

The chef that earlier challenged Onni turns around with delight, abandoning her work “Hey, you guys! The fat one’s climbing the shelves! I think he’s gonna break the skinny kid’s neck!”

 

(Year 86, Bornholm, Denmark)

“You’re sure you’re going to go back?” asks Mikkel’s mother for the fifteenth time in as many minutes “There’s a lot to do on the farm, you know. Plenty of things to keep you busy.”

“I know, Mom,” he says patiently “But there is more for me to do at the academy.”

She snorts “What’s to do at the academy but teach ungrateful brats how to burn things and do their wiccany wizardy nonsense? Your place is here, Mikkel, at home, among the…uh…” she glances around the porch they are sitting on for inspiration.

Mikkel nods towards the fluffy white flock of sheep gathered around the stream that runs through their paddock, and the pack of mismatched mutt-dogs yipping at their backs “Among the sheep and the dogs?”

“Among the sheep, yes.” she frowns a pinched frown “Wait, no, not that. Oh, look at what you made me do!” she swats his arm playfully “Taking advantage of an old woman’s decaying mind. What I meant to say is I miss the companionship. Ever since your father died…”

She falls silent.

Mikkel does as well, thinking on his late father. The man was a bit of a lunatic in the later years. Something about watching his only son entering his late twenties as a strapping, burly echo of him in his own youth made him a little bit stir-crazy, even though he only had to see him at the solstices.  
He kept coming up with more and more insane ways to prove he was still as young and vital at heart as his son was.

The last way he thought of happened to involve wrestling a grizzly bear with just his hands. The bear won, though not by much.  
They’re still finding parts of Mikkel’s father scattered around the surrounding fields, and it seems every week that Mikkel has been here, there has been a fresh occasion to exhume his father’s coffin and add another piece of him to the jumble inside. There’s also a piece of bear in there. Mikkel’s father died with a scrap of torn ear he apparently chewed off in his dying fits, clenched in one hand. They thought it best to bury him with the trophy he died obtaining.

“Oh fuck it. I’m not gonna ask you to stay here. I’ll just get another dog and maybe seduce that farmhand down the road.”

Mikkel nearly spits back into his coffee. His mother turns to him with a grin that makes her wrinkles gather around her eyes, and snickers.

“Charming, Mom.” he shakes his head in mock-disbelief “That’s…that has almost made me want to stay here.”

“No, no, you’ve got a life, and students that love you. They love you, don’t they?”

“They don’t hate me.”

“Oh, my modest boy,” she claps his forearm “Are you seeing anyone yet?”

“No. I’d rather be working than dating right now.”

She snorts “So work and date! Your father and I met on the front lines of the Danish campaigns. No reason you shouldn’t date a colleague, right?”

“There are plenty of reasons.”

“What about that woman you work with? The crazy Norwegian you’re always telling me about with that necklace of troll teeth? Sigrid?”

“Sigrun?” Mikkel raises his eyebrows “You’re not serious-”

“Why don’t you try it with Sigrun?”

“I’d prefer to go out with someone because I’m attracted to them, not because my mother is getting worried she won’t have any grandchildren before she turns seventy.”

“You’re damned right!” chirps his mother, slamming her fist on the arm of her rocking chair “There’s your priority for the year, son! Find a mate and make with the mating!”

Mikkel gets out of his chair and places his still-steaming mug carefully on the seat “I’m going for a walk.”

“Watch out for your father!” calls his mother after him “I nearly broke my hip on his jawbone the other day! Oh, that reminds me. Dear, would you mind terribly if I got you to dig your father up later on and toss that old bone in with the rest?”

 

(Year 86, Rural Iceland)

Reynir Árnason gets his own piece of news a night about two days before Emil Västerström’s own exile was decided upon by his parents.  
Reynir is just settling comfortably into his fifteenth year, after a bit of a rocky first few months when he was finally allowed to take his flock of sheep off, alone, like he always wanted, but also so petrified of wolves and the like attacking him that he spent nearly five hours each day poised with his crook raised over his head in case he needed to crack any canine or bear skulls.

He does not suspect what his parents are about to tell him. In fact, he is just thinking some unusually bitter thoughts, for someone with his sunny personality, about how his parents are never going to let him go anywhere or do anything when they tell him.

Reynir only notices something unusual is going on when he looks up from the loaf of bread he has been picking at for his dinner, and sees his oldest brother and youngest sister are also there.

In his excitement to greet them, Reynir nearly snorts a crumb up his nose “Big brother? Sis? What are you doing here?”

His brother opens his mouth to say something. His sister elbows him out of the way and throws her arms open wide, just in time to catch Reynir. She catches him under the arms and swings him around the way she used to do when he was a child and small enough to safely swing around in a modestly sized, enclosed space like their kitchen.

“How’s my little man?” she asks once she has put him back on his feet.

Reynir grabs his older brother’s arm for support until the room stops spinning “I’m ok, I guess.”

“Killed any bears lately?”

He laughs “No! What about you, though, what are you doing back here before the solstices?”

His brother scoffs “We can’t come back to see our favourite and littlest brother every now and again?”

Reynir shrugs, again, causing the room to spin dangerously “Well, you can, but you usually don’t.”

Over his brother’s massive shoulder, he can see their parents. Smiling, but looking slightly grey. 

Before he can ask what’s wrong, his brother sticks his right hand in his face “Notice anything new?”

“Oh my gods, where’s your thumb?”

He lets out a deep belly laugh that shakes some dust from the rafters “Where indeed? I’ll tell you a little later! Hey, Mama, Papa, how about we all go for a walk? I missed the country. I want to get a look at it.”

“Oh why keep the little guy in suspense?” his sister drives her elbow into his brother’s substantial stomach “Let’s tell him now so he can get all his excitement out outside. Maybe cause a landslide while he’s at it. You know how he screams.”

Reynir blinks “What? What’s going on? Am I getting a bigger flock?”

He notices his parents exchange a glance, filled with dread and something like grief.

It is his father who blurts it out “You’re going to the Academy.”

All along the row of houses on their street and a little further down, into the heart of their little hamlet, a shrill scream which many take to be the death cry of some small animal echoes and echoes, bouncing all the way up into the mountainous crags that surrounds the hamlets and spooking rabbits into their burrows, and birds from their trees. 

Those who know the family and know the scream from being around when Reynir has stepped in a pile of animal leavings or tripped over the gnawed corpse of a sheep, on the rare occasions the wolves do get close to the flocks, are checking in with the family all afternoon to make sure he’s alright and intact.

 

(Year 86, Dalsnes, Norway)  
The first summer Sigrun Eide left Dalsnes for the Academy, her father cried so hard he dehydrated himself and had to lie down for a few hours while she finished packing. Her mother cried too, but only sparingly, as she was more interested in explaining to Sigrun how one should conduct themselves outside of the military.

Not that Sigrun has ever gotten very far from the military. She is not interested in leaving the military. Her parents are both Generals (affectionately nicknamed Mrs and Mr General by their cohort) and she was promoted to Captain at the tender age of 18, thanks to an early start in her career.  
While it is not uncommon for an especially keen Norwegian to commit to the military training effort in Dalsnes at 13 years of age, it is definitely not recommended. 

About ten years into her military career and five years after assuming her Captaincy, Sigrun noticed an unfortunate trend among the members of her outfit who were recruited from abroad.  
They were sorely underprepared. Most of them were as young as she was when she became a Captain, and jumped out of their skins at the merest mention of trolls, let alone at the sight of them.

Upon encountering a troll, the Icelanders, Finns Swedes, and Danes were prone to scream and duck behind the tallest Norwegian on hand. They did not weather their injuries as well as their local contemporaries, and nor were they as well-versed in their weapons training.

Eventually it occurred to Sigrun that this might be normal, and that her Norwegian troops might just be fucking lunatics when compared to the rest of the known world. But then she proved her own theory wrong when she thought back over the times she had encountered and cooperated with Danish and Swedish Cleansing efforts, and the time her father had taken her on a kind of field trip.

She was fourteen then and still very new to the idea of killing massive, blood-slobbering monsters with her bare hands. But also, incredibly enthused and so full of energy that her father decided it was best she exercised some of it outside of Dalsnes so he and his wife would stop getting so many complaints about her behaviour.

Mr General took his daughter with him on a trip to escort some Icelandic royalty- something like that. Sigrun never figured out their exact position, but now that she thinks back to it, they were probably members of the Council.  
They travelled in an over-land convoy for the sake of speed, which was why they needed someone with as much experience and power as Mr General. Sigrun, too, was a welcome addition once she proved herself by dispatching a troll with nothing but her boot and a bobby pin that was stray in her pig-tails.

At one point, the convoy was attacked by a Giant. Her father was busy fending off another troll on the other side of the convoy and didn’t see it coming until the Giant was already there, pressed up to the side of the vehicle.  
Sigrun was all set to climb out the window, but before she could, the Icelander beside her, a troop roughly twice her age, let out a blood-curdling battle-cry and flung herself through the window, at the troll. The Icelander killed the Giant with a knife and sheer determination.

So, no, Sigrun thought, it’s not that Norwegians are the only fucking lunatics. Something is wrong here.

The problem, as she discovered it, was that most of the recruits sent to Dalsnes were sent from the Academy in Sweden. They were not the worst, but they were not the best of the students either. Sigrun’s new troops were the ones who had just barely missed flunking and who were sent out into Norway, to Sigrun’s outfit specifically, in the hopes that they would be toughened up.

It worked.  
By the end of their first summer, most of the former wimps were picking their teeth with daggers and singing cheerful, filthy songs about busty Valkyries and their toy-boys as they dispatched trolls.

But Sigrun was not satisfied by the progress. In fact, she was concerned that the Council would allow such adorably unprepared green-horns into the field, where they would have easily been killed if it were not for the helpful and friendly Norwegians they had been sent to. 

So, Sigrun set out to change that. The school year of the Academy lasted through the fall to the end of spring, and the summers and solstices in between were taken off to be spent with family.

Sigrun would spend her falls, winters and springs at the Academy as a teacher of the Defensive Arts, and her summer back with her troops, their Captain returned, slaughtering any troll that so much as gurgled in her presence.

“Have you seen the new recruits yet?”

Sigrun snaps out of her thoughts to find herself slouching in a large, bearish shadow “Mikkel!”

She stands, and slaps a brawny shoulder by way of greeting “How was Denmark?”

He shrugs “Still Denmark, I suppose.” he presses a thick, grey file into her hands “Read this. Check page 110 especially.”

She cocks an eyebrow “Really? We’re already talking about work?”

Sigrun gestures around the empty staffroom, showing Mikkel how empty and devoid of life it is. So much space for relaxation. So much time to be spent snoozing on the desks and dreaming of the fantastic kills they’ll make in the summer.  
Mikkel takes the file from her and opens it on the desk to the relevant page.

“Look at this.” he puts a finger on an ID photo “This is Hotakainen’s cousin.”

Sigrun lets out a low whistle “Check out the cheekbones on that one. Is that a girl or a – no, it’s a boy. Hard to tell with that family. You know I thought Stubby was a boy for the first five weeks of last year?”

“I know.”

“And you let me kept thinking that, you big bastard!” she punches him in the arm again, grinning “Hey, do we know that kid?”

She points to a boy of the same age as the second Hotakainen, just underneath his ID photo. The kid looks unhappy, as if someone he hated was dancing outside the frame of the photo when it was taken. But his hair is fantastic. Like spun gold; even catching the light and appearing to glow like the precious metal.  
Sigrun is impressed.

“There aren’t many kids his age who can pull that kind of face.” she observes, tracing the frown with her forefinger “I’ll be interested to see his progress.” she moves her finger to the next face, which is puppyish and beaming “And this guy looks like he’s going to get eaten alive.”

Mikkel looks over her shoulder at the braided, smiling boy in the photo “Hm. Icelandic mage. There aren’t many of those that don’t go to their own mages’ Academy.”

“Good thing he’s coming here, isn’t it? Better than going to that poofy mage academy anyway. Here he’s going to learn how to defend himself, as well as all that magic shit.”

“What a charming way to sum it up.”

Sigrun grins “Hey, give me a break. I’m excited for this year. A batch of fresh faces. More innocent young souls to warp, as you put it last year. Aren’t you excited, Mikkel?”

“A little, I suppose. It would really be something if you would help me with this.” 

He hands her another, thicker file.

She frowns “What’s this?”

“The paperwork for dietary requirements and medical problems. We need to get them sorted into the appropriate folders by the end of the day.”

Sigrun groans “I changed my mind. I’m not excited anymore.”

This time, Mikkel smiles a little bit.


	2. The Academy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One of the men throws his broad, muscular arms around Braidy. Looks like a bear trying to scale a sapling.  
> “We’re so proud of you, Reynir!”
> 
> Aha! Male name!  
> Except Emil once knew a girl called Lars and a boy called Thora; the gender of the name doesn’t always match the biological state of affairs. Back to square one, then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the question "What even is gender?" is posed

In spite of the name and popular belief, the Mora Academy is not actually in Mora.  
The city itself is quite crowded with all manner of private citizens and scholars and skalds and foreigners and the odd troop of Cleansers, all using passing through the streets, on their way to other countries via the railway, or to jobs in the surrounding area. So it wouldn’t really make much of a difference to add packs of squalling school-children to the masses.

But it was also judged that because of the general crowdedness of the new capital of Sweden, the Academy could not be built there and expect to have as much space as the various training fields and sparring grounds would require.

The name ‘Mora Academy’ stayed on top of the blue-prints, while the location of the Academy moved a few miles into the outskirts of the city.  
Here, from a hill-top with sports fields and low buildings sprawling out all over the Academy’s estate, Mora is clearly visible as a collection of rooftops, a spider-web of smoky columns rising from the hearths of homes, with the winding tail of the train, ploughing on into the dark wilderness that begins not that far behind the Mora Academy.

A beautiful view on both sides, for those of strong stomach.  
But Emil is not prepared to appreciate the beauty of his home country. He just wants to sulk right now.

His aunt and uncle left him with an unnecessary amount of crying, hugging (his uncle) and advice on what to do if someone tried to sexually assault him (his aunt), and, of course, extracted promises that he would come down at least twice a month to visit with his cousins and have a home-cooked meal.

Because Emil likes his aunt and uncle, somewhat more than he does his own parents, he made a small effort to appear not totally devastated by the turn of events. If they saw through his mock-cheer, then they didn’t say so. If his parents had dared to show up in Mora to say goodbye to him, he probably would have grabbed his mother by the braid and thrown her over the distant boundaries of Mora’s wall, like a screaming javelin.

Emil sits on the front steps of the Academy. Other families have been trickling in and out, leaving behind distraught or excited children. Sometimes more than just one. Emil finds himself wishing for the first time in his life that he was not an only child, or that one of his cousins was old enough to attend with him.  
None of them are older than three right now, so he’s on his own as far as age contemporaries in his family goes.

Like him, the others have all packed light. Most have only one or three suitcases at the most. He even sees a girl going by with nothing more than a sword at her belt and a little shoulder bag. He is just trying to figure out if she plans to wear the same grey sweater and trousers all year round when he notices the unusual shape of her body is not weird flab at all. She is dressed in about fifteen different layers.

Emil looks down at his own two cases and wonders if he’s missed something important, here, about the way to conduct himself.  
Well, too late now to put on all five of the sweaters he packed. 

The doors will not open for at least another half hour. This gives Emil ample time to sit on the steps, leaning his head on the sharp stone banister and imagine what kinds of torments lay in store for him.

Of course, he wants to be a Cleanser. More than anything, Emil wants to be a Cleanser. There aren’t many things one can make a practical use of, when one has his particular passions.  
One is classical art from the old, destroyed world. The other is, as his parents, neighbours and extended family suspect, burning stuff and blowing shit up.

It’s just the way Emil is made.

He just likes it when things go boom.

So either his option was to become an art historian, or to become a Cleanser. With art historian, he would be sure to stay in that circle of rich elite that his parents brought him up in. A highly specialised, prestigious education, and the responsibility to protect the art that was sent to Iceland in the early years of the Rash Illness.  
On the surface, it looked like he would be able to sit around all day, be charming when it was demanded of him, then spend the rest of his time staring at the Monet’s and Van Gogh’s and Khalo’s siting in storage. In reality, it would mean piercing boredom, dissatisfaction with his job, his friends and himself, and probably a bullet in his mouth at the end of it all.

On the other hand, he could be a Cleanser. Risking his life to blow things up.  
Sounds more like his kind of thing. If Emil can find a way to incorporate fine, ancient art into the explosions, then he’ll be set.

But for now, there is nothing for Emil to do but watch his future classmates.

He is embarrassed to see no one else’s family making as much of a fuss as his did over him. A few tears are shed. Nothing like the small lake that issued from Uncle Torbjörn’s eyes when he told him he was proud that Emil, his only nephew, was willing to put his life at risk for the cause of protecting the Known world.  
A few bits of advice on how to stay on a healthy diet and to make sure to get enough sleep. Nothing like Aunt Siv telling him to go for the solar plexus or, if his aggressor happens to be another man, the nuts.

On the bright side, he does see one kid getting hugged a lot.

Emil thinks it’s a boy. The braid confuses things, as well as the gauzy, sky-blue cloaks Icelanders tend to wear these days, which hides the person’s shape so effectively they could in fact be a canoe with a wig on, and Emil wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from this angle.

Then the kid turns around, revealing a big smile and some frustratingly androgynous features. Around them are a host of similarly braided (though their hair is not as fantastically long, and not red at all) and robed adults that are either much older siblings, or young aunts and uncles.  
Maybe cousins, which would explain the disparity with the hair colour.

Because he has nothing better to do, Emil decides to listen into their conversation. They are not that far away, and besides, they are all so loud he doesn’t have to worry about losing their words in the stream of noise around them.  
They are carrying on in Icelandic. Emil’s Icelandic is not quite fluent, but perfectly passable. Now that he thinks about it, since Icelandic is the international language, his parents probably made him study it from such a young age in anticipation of the day they would be able to boot him out of the house. With minimal guilt, because at least Emil can communicate his distress to people that don’t speak Swedish.

Braidy is plainly excited. Their voice is one of those voices hovering exactly in the middle between a deep, masculine base and a higher, feminine lilt. The two blend to produce a voice that reminds Emil of the way forest elves are supposed to sound. All high, tinkling laughter when you amuse them, and scratchy, scraped voices when they curse you. 

“…write every week. Two weeks, maybe, if I get a lot of work.”

One of the women, the older of the two there, slaps Braidy’s narrow shoulder “We’ll write every week! There’s four of us, so even if three of us get too busy or incapacitated, you won’t be neglected.” 

One of the men throws his broad, muscular arms around Braidy. Looks like a bear trying to scale a sapling.  
“We’re so proud of you, Reynir!”

Aha! Male name!  
Except Emil once knew a girl called Lars and a boy called Thora; the gender of the name doesn’t always match the biological state of affairs. Back to square one, then.

“You’re going to do great.” says the other woman “Just…just don’t expect too much from yourself, ok?”

Braidy’s smile doesn’t falter for a second “Ok!”

“Keep in mind,” says the bigger of his two brothers/uncles by far “I didn’t kill my first troll until I was three months deep in my career. Sometimes things come slower, but that just makes it sweeter.”

“Ok!” chirps Braidy again.

It is clear, whether Braidy wills it or not, most of what is being said is going in one ear and out the other.

After that, it’s another round of hard goodbye-hugs and some kisses on the cheek and the top of the head. At one point, Emil thinks the biggest of the brothers/uncles is about to pop Braidy’s swan neck right off their torso, but it turns out he is just giving him one of those knuckles-drilling-into-skull-hugs that older siblings are apparently prone to giving.  
Emil wouldn’t know.

The group breaks up around Braidy and leave the grounds in the vague direction of the ports. Both Braidy and the other four wave to each other until the four disappear from sight, and Braidy is left there, alone, poised on the tips of their feet in an effort to catch a last glimpse of their family.

Poor kid.

As it turns out, Braidy is one of those people who can live out of one suitcase, which is good. Emil wishes he could do that, but he needs the room for his sketchpads and pencils. His father had the nerve to suggest he take a year’s break from drawing to concentrate on his school work. If Emil had had the power to change himself into a dragon and scorch the man to a pile of ashes on the kitchen floor, he would have done so without hesitation.

He would rather leave his nose at home than his tools.

“Excuse me.”

Emil looks up to find Braidy standing at the bottom of the steps.

“Do you know when the doors open?”

“Little under half an hour,” responds Emil, hoping his Swedish accent isn’t too comical.

Braidy brightens up “Oh that’s good! I thought we would have to wait for a few hours. Cold, isn’t it? I didn’t know it got this cold in Sweden.”

Emil isn’t sure how to reply to this, apart from “Well, we are in the North.”

Braidy thinks this is funny “You know what’s weird? You’re Swedish, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so, ‘cos everyone in Iceland is either white-blond or raven-haired or a red-head like me. I’ve never seen anyone with gold hair before (Emil tries not to look too pleased by this remark ), so I figured you were Swedish. It’s weird, though, that you guys don’t insulate your houses.” they gesture towards the distant Mora “All of the houses I saw were built free-standing. Not a single one in the grass.”

“I’m sorry? What do you mean?”  
In the grass? Apparently this elf-sounding person also lives like an elf.

“I mean with grass slopes on either side,” Braidy mimes a triangle with some very long, elegant fingers, stubbed with callouses at the tips and the pads of the knuckles “To keep the worst of the wind out.”

“Why would we need to do that?” asks Emil quizzically.

“Why not?” responds Braidy, Reynir, equally as quizzically.

“Central heating.”

“Central heating?” they repeat with a hint of amusement “That stuff burns down houses, doesn’t it?”

“Only if it explodes.”

This prompts a cautious glance from Braidy at the Academy. They seems to have just noticed that the complex is not built ‘in the grass’.

“They use central heating here.” they say, as if just remembering this critical fact.

“It’s safe, don’t worry. Unless some idiot busts a pipe and floods the place you haven’t got anything to worry about.”

Their eyes go wide, creating the effect of a blue puddle rapidly expanding “Floods too? Don’t you feel unsafe around a thing like that?”

“Um, no. I don’t think about it much.”

Braidy turns those wide, scared puppy-eyes on the Academy again and fiddles with the tip of their braid nervously “I don’t think I’m going to be able to think about anything else.”

For lack of anything else to do to comfort this weirdo, Emil decides it’s time for some formal introductions.

He sticks his hand out “I’m Emil Västerström. Cleansing-hunting major.”

It works a little too well.

Braidy, or Reynir, as he should think of him now, or run the risk of really calling him ‘Braidy’ out loud, shakes Emil’s hand so vigorously it seems like the whole thing might pop off “I’m Reynir Árnason. Mage-hunting major.”

“Mage and hunting?” repeats Emil incredulously.”

“Oh, you didn’t know you could do both?”

“I did,” lies Emil “But I…I haven’t seen many Icelandic hunters before.”

Reynir cocks a pale, red eyebrow “Really? My siblings are all hunters. They’re always talking about how many Icelanders are leaving the country now, to go kill stuff abroad. I guess you’ve just seen the Norwegian outfits, right? They’re always coming in and out of Mora, according to my big sister.”

This, Emil can say he has seen without having to add another white lie to his list of sins today “Maybe you’re right. There are a lot of Norwegians around Mora.”

“Is this where you live?”

“No, I live- lived in Östersund, but my aunt, uncle and their three changeling children live here.” He hastens to correct himself when Reynir’s mouth drops open “They’re not really changelings. They’re just hyperactive. We think one of them has ADHD, but we haven’t had them tested yet.”

He thinks he’s about to have to explain what ADHD is to Reynir when a piping voice speaks up from the bottom of the stairs. This time, he’s fairly certain he is looking at a girl.

“Have you two seen a hunched over lady? Looks kind of like a witch, but with all her teeth and a monocle?”

Since she looks significantly older than him (at least seventeen to his fifteen, which basically makes her a senior already), Emil’s immediate instinct is to assume he’s being made the victim of some weird, hazing prank.  
He’s attempting to come up with a clever reply when Reynir points behind them.

“Is that her?”

Emil follows his finger and finds himself staring at a woman that looks exactly as the older girl described her.

“Thank you!” chirps the girl.  
She bounds past them up the stairs, surprisingly spry for someone of her size- she’s got a rolls of what his mother disdainfully refers to as ‘blubber’ filling out her coat and trousers. 

Emil’s mother used the word ‘blubber’ most often when she caught him sitting around in a shirt that didn’t conceal his stomach in a swathe of fabric. She would poke his shallow belly with a sharp nail and ask him where his muscles were hiding, why were they so shy, to which he would respond by turning over on his stomach and making whale noises until she went away.  
Pretending he is a beached whale, dying of boredom at her criticisms is his favourite and most effective strategy when it comes to combatting his mother’s tendency to complain at and about her son whenever she sees him.

“She’s coming back with a ladder.” observes Reynir.

They dodge out of the way as the older girl’s ladder slides in between them. She grunts with the exertion of holding a good 10 metres of wood, folded into two 5-metre sections for convenience, and shoulders most of the weight on one, slightly brawny shoulder that speaks of battle-experience. Or, at least a really strong sibling she arm-wrestles with a lot.

“Need some help?” asks Reynir before he can.

“That would be great, actually. I’ll need someone to hold the ladder while I get my cousin out of the tree.”  
She says this so matter-of-factly, Emil wonders if he heard her completely wrong.

He takes the back-half of the ladder and lowers it onto his own shoulder. The girl groans a little with relief.

She continues “This is my cousin’s first year at the Academy. I joined a year ago, but I was traded out as an office assistant. Back in Keuruu (which Emil knows to be a Finnish military base) I worked as a secretary for the military. Anyway, they wanted some fresh blood, I think, or they might have been importing a captain’s squeeze- they did that last year. Someone got traded out to the Norwegian front-line so one of the captains could bring their Norwegian boyfriend down, but anyway, that’s what happened to me, but this year I’m here as a student,” she is steering Emil towards a small building- a shed, really- on the left side of the compound, crouched in the shade of a few wind-bowed trees “My cousin was going to come up this year as well, so it worked out great. The thing is, we, me and my brother, we’re his family, we didn’t tell him he was going to the Academy until it was too late for him to run away.”

“My parents did the same thing.” mutters Emil.

“Really? Mine were worried I’d run away to the Academy early. I was so excited I cried when I found out I was going.”

Emil cried too. Into a pillow, so his parents wouldn’t hear. His kitten came over and sat on his head to make him feel better, which kind of worked. There are not many moods which can persist when a small, fluffy purring machine perches on top of one’s head and makes the sound of a boat’s engine running smoothly.

“So, anyway, my cousin finds out we’re going to get vaccines at the end of the week-”

“Huh?” asks Reynir 

She smiles at him, in the way one would smile at a small child that has just spilled juice on themselves “Oh, you didn’t know? Well we’re getting a vaccine at the end of the week so we don’t pass around diseases.”

Their face pales “What kind of diseases?”

“Chickenpox, rabies, the ‘flu,” lists Emil “Uh, that one where your eyes bug out of your head and go crusty.”

“You can’t vaccinate for pink-eye.”

“What? Are you serious?”

They have arrived at the side of the building now, and Emil helps the chubby girl prop the ladder up against a fork in the tree.

“Yes, I’m serious. If somebody’s got pink-eye the only way not to get it is…” she trails off and grows quiet for a moment “Just not to get it.”

Meanwhile, Reynir’s face has grown as pale. Their freckles stand out for miles on milk-white skin.  
“Just how many diseases can people give me- uh, us?”

Emil shrugs “A lot. My aunt’s working on the team that are trying to develop a vaccine for the Rash, so all she ever talks about are diseases. The other diseases that survived the apocalypse and stuff. A lot of the human-carried ones actually died out once our species almost did.” he counts a few of the worst offenders off, if only to make Reynir feel a little better “The strep throat bacteria, lyme disease since all the ticks died off and a few of the common colds. Apparently they didn’t have time to be passed on before their hosts died.”

“Huh,” says Reynir, and then they are knocked on the head by a boot.

The boot falls from the upper-boughs of the tree. In the excitement of discussing which diseases are still floating around, they have both completely forgotten the cousin in the tree.  
Now that Emil’s looking for him, he can see a flash of silver and grey moving through the screen of green. Being hauled backwards, it would seem.

Though the conversation is slightly muffled by the rustling of the tree and made unintelligible to Emil by being in a language he has no knowledge of, he gets the gist of the conversation.  
There seems to be a lot of curses being flung around, as well as several pleas to several gods to sort this wily motherfucker out.

But only in the girl’s voice. Her opponent remains silent. Then a boot flies out of nowhere and knocks Reynir into the snow.

Emil helps Reynir to their feet “Are you alright?”

Reynir rubs at the goose-egg already forming at their temple “Oh, sure. I’m the youngest brother out of five siblings. I’ve taken so many beatings, getting hit on the head with a boot is like…well, just getting hit on the head with a boot. I’ve been thrown out of two-story windows before.”

So Reynir is a boy. That settles that mystery.

The struggle above has come to a head. The girl’s angry Finnish has reached an all-time angry, and the canopy of the tree rustles so frantically you’d think Ratatoskr was up there, making the rounds around the earths.

The girl’s legs appear on the ladder. As she climbs down carefully and awkwardly, it becomes apparent there is another person slung over her shoulder. They hang limp, but not in a manner that suggests defeat. More like a rag-doll. One time, Emil fell down all three flights of stairs in his house in rapid succession, and managed to survive the experience with little more than a bruise on his shin by going as limp as a rag-doll. 

The person on the girl’s back is doing a wonderful rag-doll.

Once on the ground again, she peels him from her shoulder and puts him on his feet, steadying him with hands under his arms.

And once again, in the space of the same half hour, Emil has found himself unable to distinguish an obvious gender.  
Boy? Girl? Neither? Somewhere in between? Both?

Could be any combination or one of the standard two. 

Either way, those are the sharpest cheekbones he has ever seen, and the greyest hair on a person that can’t be older than sixteen.

The girl brushes a leaf from her own white-blonde hair “I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I’m Tuuri Hotakainen, and this is my cousin, Lalli Hotakainen.”

She elbows her cousin sharply in their skinny side, muttering something in Finnish.

“Hi.” is what they come out with.

The next sound is of the electric bell ringing, and the doors creaking in onto the insides of the Academy.


	3. Induction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well I've been very sick this weekend (ah, my genetics, they are bastards) but apparently sickness equates to productivity.
> 
> After all, half-dead is still half-alive! Enjoy this 14 page monster!

Lalli is making plans.

Revenge plans.

Light revenge only, because Onni is his cousin. No matter how much of a jackass Onni can be, Onni doesn’t deserve to die. Even for a sin so paramount as to ship him off into the middle of a strange, alien civilization with the weirdest looking cows he has ever seen all over the streets (seriously, who rides a cow for transport? Might as well use a scooter that stops to eat a kilogram of grass every ten metres, although, for some reason, none of the weird cows were grazing), to leave him with only Tuuri and a bunch of maniacs determined to blast the Rash off the face of the Known world with dynamite and fire, Onni does not deserve to die.

Lalli’s just not going to write to him.  
He only grunted when Onni asked him to, as Onni stuck him on the ship bound for Sweden. 

Onni said a lot of other things, including “Don’t tell Tuuri I cried,” as he mopped up his eyes on his already damp sleeve.

They barely spoke to each other while Lalli was packing his bags to go, except when Onni had to tell Lalli to leave his rifle behind and to hide his knife, if he absolutely had to take it.  
Neither of them are talkative people, if they can help it. Besides, it was kind of awkward, because Onni still had a half-moon of red puncture wounds on his arm from where Lalli had bit him, and Lalli still had the same mark on his left hand from where Onni revenge bit him.

The only reason Lalli isn’t going to do something more significant to Onni, like sending him an envelope that is empty except for the skulls of a few small rodents, is because of the second-to-last thing Onni said to him just before he ushered him onto the ferry.

He collected Lalli up in an awkward hug “I love you, alright?”

Lalli thought about only grunting affirmative, but he made himself respond in kind “Love you too.”

Probably the first time in his life he ever admitted to actually liking his family members. They’re weird and chubby and probably weigh 171 kg between them, but they’re his family. And, whether he wants to or not, he loves them.

This is the only reason he’s sitting next to Tuuri in the assembly. Really, if he had a choice as to where he’d be in the crowded hall, it would be swinging from one of the light fixtures and hissing at all the people below him.  
He hates crowds almost as much as he dislikes people in general. Put more than one person in an enclosed space, and stupid is bound to happen. Just the way society works.

There are a lot of people in here. He has heard languages he has never heard before, and which he can only guess at; Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, what he thinks must be a few of the Uralic languages- maybe Southern Sami, and German and Russian. He even hears what he guesses is Farsi or Punjabi, because they are being spoken respectively by a girl wearing a chador and another boy wearing a turban. And then there is a group of three boys with very black hair and almond-shaped eyes speaking amongst themselves in what he guesses is Mandarin.  
One of those super-endangered languages you don’t hear that much in the Known World, at least. 

One of the things Tuuri was most excited to share with Lalli was the other cultures she had come across. In places like Keuruu, so out of the way and isolated, the populations are mostly homogenously white Finnish.   
The closest Lalli has ever come to encountering a person who wasn’t a Finn as white as the snow was one of the chefs back at the base, who was half- Haitian (whatever that is), and a few of the captains coming in from abroad. A lot of them were women with the headscarves Muslim women sometimes wear. 

This was before he and his cousins had ever seen Keuruu- these were incredibly important people, visiting his grandmother for reasons Lalli is still not quite sure he understands. 

His grandmother explained this thing called ‘immigration’ to him when Lalli started to get confused (back when he was so young he thought people came in one colour only), and how a lot of people had already brought their families from different places to live here before the Rash descended on the world. Also, a lot of people got caught in these things called ‘airports’, which is apparently some kind of port, like for boats, except for those giant metal crows people used to fly around in. 

Tuuri doesn’t know that he knows this, as far as Lalli knows. They have never talked about it. Or, at least, when she gushed in her letters to both him and Onni about how cool it was to meet people whose families spoke entirely different languages and followed different gods, Lalli didn’t mention in his clipped responses that he knew about those ‘immigrants’.

He, himself, is not really sure he knows what an ‘immigrant’ is, but they sound like brave people. Dropping everything to come and live in a place as cold as Finland.   
If Lalli was a modern person and didn’t love and need the snow as much as he needs his own blood, he might have dropped everything and gone to live in a place where he didn’t sometimes have to climb out of a window instead of using the door, when it had snowed especially violently in the night previous.

“Isn’t this exciting?” whispers Tuuri in Finnish.

“Guess so.” his response is sullen, and Tuuri picks up on it.

She wraps a thick arm around his shoulders and pulls him into a one-armed hug “I’m sorry, Lalli, but we were running late. I was panicking. I didn’t want you to make us late on the first day.”

He shoots her a stern look “Don’t do that.”

“What?” her face is a perfect portrait of innocent.

“Put all the blame on me.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying I needed to get you out of the tree.”

“And you needed a Swede and a…” Lalli glances at the other person. They ended up sitting right beside them, in fact, and the Swede is beside Tuuri. He and the other person, who could be anything from a boy to a girl to those genders in between that are so hard to define, talk to each other in Icelandic. 

The braided person’s Icelandic is pure and provincial, and the Swede’s is very Swedish, which is how Lalli guessed where he was from. Also, he’s only ever seen Swedes being as blond as this guy is being. His short gold hair catches the harsh, pasty artificial light in the same way snow does, and glows softly, like the genuine article. The other person has red hair that’s so red it kind of looks like they bled all over themselves then wound it up in a braid to keep up appearances. To spare their neck the stress of holding the thing up, they have laid the braid out on the desk. It goes on for longer than their forearm.

Around them, the hall is absolutely filled to capacity. Tuuri chose an aisle seat so Lalli could sit next to the stairs, knowing how much he would hate to wrestle a stranger for a shared arm-rest and the effort it would take to respond if his seat-mate tried to talk to him.   
Across the aisle, the other rows are full of people. Most of them seem to be sitting next to people they know- hence the reason Lalli hears so many languages other than Icelandic.

The floor of the hall falls away in levels, to a large raised-stage and speaker’s podium in the centre of the very bottom. He does not envy the poor fool whose job it is to get up on that stage and call the attention of a crowd of more than a thousand, each of the eager to continue conversations of their own. And then to hold all that attention?  
Gods, if that were his job, he would hide up an even bigger tree than the one he picked today and bring his dagger with him, so he could fight anyone that tried to retrieve him.

Seeing that Lalli is neither interested nor capable of speech at the moment, Tuuri turns and joins in the conversation with the other two. They are talking about how much homework they expect, and which lectures will be shared among them.  
From listening, Lalli knows the guy with the gold hair, Emily or something, is a Cleanser-hunting major. The braided person is an Icelandic mage, born and bred, majoring in Magic Studies and hunting, which means they are going to be in all of Lalli’s lectures.

Great. He’s already made a friend and he hasn’t even said a word to the person, beyond a sullen ‘hi’.

Fortunately, before Tuuri can try to make him act more sociable, a woman climbs onto the stage. She’s got hair about as red as the mage beside the guy beside Tuuri. Standing at around six feet tall, with muscles on her like a cougar’s and the smile of someone who might not be of the soundest mind, she kind of reminds him of Onni. If Onni were a much slimmer, flame-haired woman with the smile of a cat about to pounce on a mouse.

Most of the hall has not noticed her. She puts her first two fingers in her mouth and produces the most ear-splitting whistle. With his heightened hearing, Lalli is hit especially hard by it. The note reaches octaves a simple whistle should never reach and he nearly falls out of his seat as a result.

Silence falls thickly and quickly.

The woman is satisfied with her effect and takes a moment to appreciate the slightly terrified looks on the faces of her audience. 

Now, her grin is somewhere between welcoming and predatory “Good evening, everyone.”

This surprises Lalli. Very tame for a woman who looks more likely to unsheathe the knife at her side and throw it at the kid that looks the most frightened than to speak rationally, but, then, maybe it is time he stops thinking of the rest of his species as predictable. After all, he could have never guessed how quickly Onni would be up that shelf after him.

“I see a lot of fresh faces today, so to you people, welcome to the Academy. Of course a lot of you are going to be going home by the end of the first month, and even more of you are going to hate the sight of my face for the hell you’re gonna face in Physical Education…so I guess this is my only real chance to speak cordially to about half of the audience,” she pauses and scans the crowd, as if those who will drop out or come to hate her are about to jump up and admit their future crimes.

“That’s Sigrun Eide.” whispers Tuuri very loudly, so both Lalli and the other two can hear her “She’s the one in charge of training us all for battle. I’ve watched a lot of her classes. She is really nice, like, really nice, but someone cries every time.”

“Cries?” the blond guy is mortified by even the suggestion “Whatever for?”

Tuuri sucks a breath past her teeth “Oh, you’ll see. Her lessons are tough. I’m actually terrified to be in one of them.”

“Then again,” continues Sigrun Eide, her tone suddenly much lighter “I also see a lot of people that survived for second, third and fourth years. Hiya, Zainab, Lars. Good summers?

A girl in a headscarf waves cheerfully from the fifth row, and a boy three rows behind her calls “A honey badger got into my house and ate all of our shoes!”

A lot of people crack up, including Tuuri. A lot more are too terrified to speak.

“Zainab is top of the class in just about everything,” clarifies Tuuri “She will be graduating this year. Lars is pretty dumb, actually, but Sigrun likes him because he’s earnest. They were her favourites last year. She always has some favourites, kind of like pets or a collection.”

“That’s strange.” says the blond guy “Is she allowed to play favourites?”

Tuuri smiles at the irony of what he has just said- which is lost on everyone else “You’ll understand her when you meet her.”

Lalli makes a mental note to avoid this woman at all costs.

She’s talking again “Most of you are here because there was a call for arms this summer. I bet most of you asked your guardians to send you personally, knowing there would be so many spaces open this year.”

“There was a call to arms?” repeats Lalli, in Finnish “When?”

“Sometime when you and Onni were traipsing around in Finnish frozen nowhere,” replies Tuuri tartly “Ssh, you really should listen to her. This is important.”

“A call to arms?” repeats the braided person “I didn’t know about that.”

The blond guy shrugs in confusion.

“Well, I’m here to tell you there aren’t actually that many spaces open this year. The call to arms? Nothing but a clever market ploy,” she lets out a small, diabolic cackle “See? Some of you are starting to hate me already, but the credit doesn’t go to me. Our Principal, Madame Sunderburg, decided this is how we were going to…well, I see no reason to explain it right now. You’ll find out very soon. The bottom line is this: this is not an easy programme. Your lectures will be intensive and demanding, and your physical classes?” another pause for another laugh “Almost every time I take a class, somebody cries. And it ain’t because I’m mean either! And by the way, while we’re on the subject of behaviour, this is a friendly environment. We don’t fuck around when it comes to the way we treat each other around here. And, yeah, I just said ‘fuck’ on a stage in front of a bunch of kids. Write home about it. If there’s even one complaint that some moron who’s never seen a skin colour even slightly darker or lighter than their own made an ignorant comment about their classmate, that person will be so thoroughly investigated it’s gonna feel like a strip search. And, yeah, I just said ‘strip search’ in front of a bunch of kids. I hope one you’re all keeping a tally of how much you’re offended.”

People are by now either too afraid to mutter or too delighted by their new teacher’s behaviour not to. Many turn to each other, grinning and nudging sides with elbows. Others sink lower and lower into chairs to avoid being seen and possibly addressed individually by her.  
Lalli is one of the latter.

Blond guy seems quite taken aback by her language “She…she just dropped an F-bomb in front of a thousand children.”

“Are your ears smoking? Mine are!” the braided person looks dazed- unsure of how they should react to this display, but leaning towards liking her more than towards hating her.

“My point is, there should be no animosity among each other. There’s no need to bully each other out of placements, because that’s going to take care of itself. I’m sure you’re all good people- well, scratch that, actually, some of you look like absolute shits, but you know what I mean. I’m sure the majority of you are hard-workers, but working hard doesn’t get you far enough in this programme. Any of our programmes, I mean. You need a support network. At some point, all of you are going to have a nervous sobbing breakdown, and somebody’s gonna need to hold you during that. Make sure you’ve got a friend like that, and that you’re being a friend like that.”

Tuuri nudges Lalli in the side “Will you hold me?” her smile is teasing.

He grunts.

Sigrun Eide continues “If you’re here to be a hunter, you will need to know how to work on a team. If you’re here to be a healer or a mage or anything at all, you will need to know how to work on a team. What a lot of you probably haven’t had the exposure to understand is just how much team-work goes into keeping you all alive. The human race, in general, preventing it from carking it. It’s a helluva lot of cooperation with anyone and everyone still alive. That counts you folks. I could go on for hours and hours about this, but we’re short on time as it is. Besides, you’ll all have your chance to figure it out.”

As she speaks the last words, her eyes find Lalli. They literally find him. Her eyes brighten a little as they land on him, and lock with his. A little smile curves the corner of her mouth- a genuine, inviting smile. A greeting without humour or malice. Just excitement to see him and others like him; the young and promising, whom she has the privilege of teaching for another year.

That is what Lalli has gleaned by the time her gaze moves on, anyway.

He straightens up a little bit “When are the vaccinations?”

“End of the week. I’ll hold your hand if-”

“Can I ask to go first?”

Tuuri is so surprised she can’t say another word for the rest of the assembly.

 

After Sigrun is finished terrifying and inspiring the batch of newbies mixed in with the oldies, she exits the stage to a round of applause that is both uncertain and rapturous. As usual. Scared ‘em and won their hearts. She’s good at that; striking a balance between being a frightening authority figure and a cool/weird older aunt figure at the same time.  
That was how Mikkel put it, anyway. He was so drunk at the time he doesn’t remember saying it at all and will deny the description vehemently every time Sigrun quotes him.

She leaves the hall via a side-door beside the stage, and steps into a small, crowded staff room. Or, as the staff put it, ‘the closet of shame’.  
As oppose to cluttering up the hall and weathering the stare of curious new faces, the staff elect to wait out each assembly in this small room, talking amongst themselves, until their presence is immediately required on the stage.

The room is just about big enough to fit the ten teachers who are going to be speaking today, along with a few pieces of furniture rescued from the dorm. 

“You’re up, Malin!” Sigrun cracks her neck “Easy crowd this year.”

A woman stands from the sagging couch against the far wall “Great, great. I hate it when they’ve got no sense of humour. Any funny faces I should be watching?”

Each year, the first speaker of the first assembly (always Sigrun) is tasked with identifying a student that pulls hysterical faces in reaction to what they are being told. The teachers look at this student to give themselves the little lift needed to carry an assembly of over a thousand children (more like eight hundred by the time the hazing period is finished). Last year’s funny face graduated into the ranks of the Cleansers, so they need some fresh material.

“There’s this kid with a huge braid in the middle,” Sigrun throws herself down onto the couch in the empty space- next to Mikkel, incidentally “The kid is so excited they’re on the verge of filling their pants.”

Malin grins “Boy or girl? In between?”

“I can’t tell.”

With a deep breath to steel herself, Malin walks out into the hall, closing the door quickly behind her. Few students ever see the Closet of Shame. Most of them think it’s connected to the larger staff-room deeper into the school.  
Of the few students who do see the Closet of Shame, they are sworn into secrecy with the strictest consequences threatened, should they breathe a word of what they have seen. Even though the Closet of Shame is just an oddly named little room full of mistreated furniture students have gotten rid of over the years, it is a place dear to all of the staff’s heart. 

To give herself a little more room to manoeuvre, Sigrun manages to wriggle her arm out of being squished into Mikkel and throws an arm over one of his shoulders “So, what’s all this mess?”

A large chart is spread across the dented coffee table- a much-loved, slightly scorched piece rescued from the trash after a student started a small fire in their room with a magnifying glass and a lot of misplaced curiosity. 

“Cats.”

“The cats?” Sigrun leans forward, her interest piqued “I thought we already distributed the cats?”

The teacher bent over it, a charming Sami man named Dorste, works frantically. His eyes gleam with panic, and his hand is blur across the page, flinging ink this way and that- even though it’s only form a biro. 

“Yeah we did, but Egil puked all over the only copy of the chart of the cat distribution and now I have to do it all again off the top of my head.”  
He mutters, stumbling over his words.

“Oh, Egil. I love that little dumbass. Who’s he going to, by the way?”

“Do I not look busy to you, Sigrun? Do I look like I can look up every little stupid evil puking kitten for you to satisfy your curiosity?”

Mikkel scans the page, then taps a name a few spaces above the boxes Dorste is filling “A child named Emil Västerström.”

“Oh, we know that kid. We saw his file earlier, right?”

“I’ve looked him up since then-”

“Mikkel move your hand or I will cut it off.” orders Dorste.

“And his family are the famous Västerströms.”

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow “What, the art historian and that guy that’s famous for being nothing but rich? That’s their kid? Are they gonna settle for Egil being foisted on their son?”

Mikkel snorts “I doubt such a high-powered couple has the time to worry about their son being given a dud cat in his training.”

“I don’t know, Mikkel. Egil is a pretty heinous animal when it comes to competence.”

“You wanna give him Einar?”

Now it is Sigrun’s turn to snort “No. The high-powered couple will definitely be mad at us if we give the cat that’s gonna eat his face. Who’s getting that, by the way?”

“Sigrun I will kill you if you touch this document again. I have fifty more cats to distribute to a hundred more battle buddies and I have to post it in half an hour.”

“Are you crying?”

“EGIL PUKED ALL OVER HOURS OF WORK -DON’T TOUCH ME I’M GOING TO BITE YOU!”

Mikkel has found the second cat Sigrun asked after “Einar is going to the – oh my gods, Tuuri! I love that kid! Oh, shit, we can’t give her Einar. Einar will rip her to pieces- little spongy, stubby pieces. Give Einar to somebody else, Dorste.”

The man lets out an animalistic howl, scoops up his work and pens, and runs into a corner where he can work unmolested. 

 

“No one told me there would be team-work.” Lalli is rigid in his seat, his hands white on his arm-rests “No one told me I was going to have a partner.”

Tuuri shushes him in Finnish “Oh, hush, it’s not that bad.”

He turns to her, his movement as stiff as wooden puppet’s “I don’t need a partner.”

“Yes you do,” she says impatiently “And they’re called battle buddies. And don’t fuss so much, your partner might be sitting next to us.”

The woman on the stage, called Malin Ulfssen, is just finishing a rather spotty explanation of the partnership programme followed at the school. Each student is paired with another, whose job in the real-world would be to keep an eye on them during battle to ensure their safety.  
In reality, everyone has to watch out for everyone else, but since this is so early in their career, they have reduced it to a responsibility to preserve one other life only.

The school makes these pairings. With no prior knowledge of either student they put together, beyond what their majors are and where in the world they are from. 

Tuuri doesn’t think it’s a particularly good idea to put together two perfect strangers and expect them to become as close as siblings.   
Lalli thinks it is a terrible idea, but that is because he hates people as a species and for no other reasons yet. He will think of some more, basic, fundamental flaws later on when he has finished fuming silently.

“The dorm rooms will be assigned, to pairs to a room, four in total, and the pairings will be posted within the room so you know which one of the other three if your new best friend.”  
She does not seem to expect other people to giggle at her joke, but enjoys a good little chortle by herself “Your cats, as well.”

Someone stands up- another one of those massive, blond elf-looking types they do such a good job of making in this part of the world “What do you mean, cats?”

“That will be explained in a moment in further detail, by Professor Dorste Eliassen.”

As if on cue, there is a muted cry of distress from the door behind the stage. The woman on stage turns and barks “Dorste?”

“I’M FINE!” cries the same voice.  
A few students laugh uncertainly at this. Only a few. 

“We’re getting cats?” chirps the braided person “I love cats!”

“I have a cat,” says the blond guy a little grumpily “He’s at home, waiting for me to come home at the solstices and the summer.”

“A kitty? How cute, what’s his name?”

“Nattmara.” the blond guy smiles.

“What? Is there a joke?”

“I named him after a monster- a lady monster, but it’s one that attacks the sleeping, so-”

Lalli loses the rest of his explanation in a haze of irrational fear and anger. Whoever he is going to be paired with will hate him, he is sure. A lot of people don’t like him.  
They decide to hate him before they figure out he has little to no idea of how to behave around human beings, and then the only choice left to him is to hate them back and then they both hate each other and there is no chance for recovery and Lalli just wants to dig a hole in the snow and die, because he just cannot act as a functioning human being without a translator.

This is going to be an awful four years.

“I’m so excited.” says the braided person, bouncing in their seat.

 

Their numbers are read out by a nervous man whose name Tuuri misses. When hers and Lalli’s number is read out- the same, thank the gods!- she writes it on the back of her hand and thanks the gods one more time. Now, she doesn’t have to worry about him as much. She will be in his room. She will be there if he starts having a night terror or casting a spell in his sleep (Onni does that, like, at least once every week and his bunkmates never stopped complaining about it in Keuruu), or if he just needs a cuddle.

He doesn’t like to admit it and probably wouldn’t know how to admit it if he tried, but Lalli has a lot of anxiety about being around people. Every now and again he will crawl into bed with Tuuri, put his bony back to hers and steal most of the covers, twitching in his sleep like he’s having a dream about hunting or his work as a skald.  
Tuuri thinks it is because there is so much of her there. Being as skinny as a twig, Lalli must have some kind of compulsion to be near to people bigger than him, and sometimes he just has to indulge while also comforting himself by squeezing into bed with her. 

Sometimes she gets in bed with him, too, although he wriggles and complains fiercely and usually crawls under the bed to avoid her.

Her most major concern, beside not flushing out of the programme like a pathetic fat failure, is how Lalli is going to cope with being around people at all hours. People don’t like him, most of the time. They are intimidated by his stoic silence, his staring eyes and his tendency to steer away from conversation if he can manage it. 

This is what is on her mind when they leave the assembly for the dorms. Not how much brighter and more beautiful the campus has managed to become, now that she’s a real student and everything. Not how excited she is to be one of Sigrun Eide’s honest to god students this year, instead of just a pining observer.

How worried she is about Lalli, which kind of makes her mad. Why couldn’t she get a cousin that isn’t so high maintenance, she’s worried about leaving him on his own for what other people might say to him.   
She wishes she could have said a better goodbye to the boys (she’s pretty sure Reynir is a boy) who helped her carry Lalli down from the tree- or, at least watched with badly disguised amusement while she dragged him down, hissing and spitting. But she was concerned with Lalli, because she knew he was going to try to bolt the moment the last speaker set them free.

“Are you tired?” she asks.

He frowns. He is frowning most of the time, when aware of other people looking at him “No. Are you?”

She is surprised. Normally he doesn’t ask much about how she’s doing. He just takes it for granted she’s doing fine and enjoying being a bouncy, fat, joyful person “I’m fine, thanks, Lals. You see any numbers here?”

“They’re on the doors.” he points.

Tuuri grimaces. How did she miss those numbers?  
Pretty easily, apparently

“We’re in…no, this is in the low twenties. We’re up here.” she gestures up a staircase. 

The stairs are blocked by a pair of boys- twins, going by the fact that they have the exact same features, attempting to haul a trunk up the stairs. Tuuri thinks about squeezing past them, but then looks at their amount of cases, compared to theirs, and thinks the better of it.

“Let’s look for another staircase.” she ushers Lalli along.

“So, listen, Lalli. We’re going to be with two other people. The rooms are pretty big. We’re going to have a corner of the room to each of us, and you’re going to need to keep your stuff clean-”

“I don’t make a mess. That’s Onni.”

Tuuri pauses “Sorry, Lalli, you’re right.”

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between them, when she thinks about the two men in her life in the abstract. Both mages. Both prefer the snow and the distant chirps and barks of the wildlife to human conversation. Both are male and silver-haired and have this permanent look of slight contempt on their faces, as if something sour-smelling was glued under their nose while they slept and they know exactly who did it.

Onni is the messy one. Lalli is the one who has so few physical possessions he couldn’t make a substantial mess unless he borrowed some of her things too.

The halls are packed. Packed with students and their packs. One thing Tuuri doesn’t understand is why the school has more than enough rooms to accommodate all of the students and their luggage if they do not intend to place them all permanently. Why have this many spaces if only some are going to stay on from the original a hundred?  
Maybe six hundred, seven hundred and fifty, at her conservative guess.

With her hands filled with luggage strap and the hood of her jacket pulling at her throat, as Lalli hangs on with his free hand so as not to be separated, she surveys the faces for signs that any of these people think they are going to be somewhere in a few months that is not this place.  
None of them do, as far as she can tell. None of them have allowed themselves to consider the possibility of being flushed from the programme.

Dropped and or rejected, or kicked out by their own misbehaviour. Traumatically injured during training, falling so far behind in their studies as they recover there is no chance of catching up again, with the workload.  
Tuuri has seen it all before. In her exchange here, she has watched students having to drop out for reasons spanning from the aforementioned traumatic injury to failing every test in the semester to getting caught with drugs- boy, was that one a debacle. 

The old faces are all pretty happy with themselves too, as they have already survived a year or a few, and have no fear about making it through the year coming. For this, they are fools. Tuuri has seen plenty of old timers flush out. It’s like this in the Mora Academy; if you fuck up and keep fucking up, then it is assumed you will continue those fuck-ups into the field, and you are re-directed with as little fuss as can be made.

Simple, cruel and one hundred percent effective.

“Here, this way,” Tuuri dodges around a group of broad-shouldered boys and makes for the stairs- this set is, mercifully, clear of twins struggling with massive trunks “Lalli, you behind me?”

A grunt affirmative.

“Lalli, hold my hand. If you let go I’m never going to find you again.”

“I can find you.” he says it so softly Tuuri nearly misses it.

Or maybe it’s not soft at all. Maybe he just seems quiet when compared to the raucous people around them.

When they arrive at the top of the stairs, the crowd has thinned somewhat. There are only a few people around, loitering in doorways, getting to know their neighbours or wrestling the last of their cases into the room.  
Tuuri hears Icelandic and a scattering of a foreign language she takes to be that one Arabic language, the name of which she has forgotten completely. 

An old, white cat with a scarred muzzle and a polished collar lopes down the hall, heading their way. Seeing Lalli, it- she, looks like, she flattens her ears and hisses. Lalli hisses back without hesitation.

This attracts a few weird stares and Tuuri wills herself not to wilt.   
Onni made her promise she was not going to act ashamed of him. Through letters, he instructed her in a few sentences at a time to just relax, and he would relax, and a few other strategies which will work perfectly well for Onni while probably blowing up in her face.

They spend so much time together- being all mage-y in the woods, of course Onni thinks it is easy to deal with him. More easy than difficult, at least.  
And then here is Tuuri, trying not to run red in shame as half of a hallway of people (scattered thin, sure, but the fact remains; they have an audience) turn to stare at her cousin hissing back at the cat. 

“Number thirty five. This is us, Lalli.”

Thankfully, their room is empty.

Tuuri has to stop for a moment. She has seen these rooms plenty of times before, on errands for the students and the like, but she had only hoped in her most optimistic moments that she might end up staying in one for real. She’s going to do her best so stay in this room for as long as possible.

Four beds, each one pushed into a corner. The door is about mid-way between these beds, and there is a night-stand beside each of them, with drawers that must be for clothes. In the middle of the room, two desks pushed together, each one built to sit two people.  
A window that opens onto the snow-dusted fields and Mora, smoky in the distance.

Tuuri flings herself onto the bed in the left corner, next to the window. She props herself up on her elbows and crawls over to look out of the wide window.  
“This view is fantastic.”

Lalli grunts.

“Oh don’t tell me you miss Keuruu. Nothing to see there but walls and angry looking people.”

Lalli grunts again. He picks the bed in the corner down from Tuuri’s, and opens his case. Inside, his clothes and a few personal effects tessellate. He must have done that himself- if Onni did it, everything would be slopped in and probably would not have fit.

“We made it Lalli!”

“I wasn’t trying to get here.” says Lalli flatly “And you already were here.”

“Yeah but as an intern! Did I ever tell you how I got my place? Mikkel Madsen, he’s this big Dane, he teaches Ancient History and Modern Warfare techniques and sometimes he does Ancient Cultures too in his History classes- anyway, we got to know each other. Just because I worked for this guy called Dorste Eliassen, he was the professor that told us about the cats, and Mikkel and Professor Eliassen were like coffee buddies or something, so he got to know me and we just talked- are you listening to me?”

Lalli stuffs a hand-knitted sweater into the topmost drawer “Yes.”

“You’re not listening to me, are you?”

“I’m listening.” he insists, without much in the way of conviction.

“We talked a lot. Just about stuff, you know? At first I was worried he wanted an office romance or something, but then I realised he was married to his career- he’s on the front-line when he isn’t teaching in the summer, and it was just a really nice thing to be able to talk to a knowledgeable older guy without having to worry that he was trying to look at my boobs or something. So I told him a lot of stuff about our family and he told me about his twin sister and all that- isn’t that cool, that he’s a twin? Twins are so weird, like, how is there room for more than one of them in there? Anyway, eventually he hears about how badly I want to go out into the Silent World. So he offered to get me a place here, just like that.”

Lalli frowns and peers at her “Are you sure he doesn’t just want to look at your boobs?”

She throws her pillow at him “Yes! Listen, I’m not the naïve person here! I’m not accepting a favour from a kind man to have it back-fire on me when he asks for,” she catches herself, before the mentions the carnal act, because she isn’t sure if he even knows what sex is “Uh, adult things, alright? By the time he offered to help me- and it was helping me file my scholarship, alright? Not like, pulling strings to get me the place, since they’re so tight about who gets them.”

Again, he frowns and gives her a strange look “How did I get in?”

“You’re a Finnish mage. There aren’t many of those around that are up for training in hunting. You guys are all too busy being skalds.”

“I didn’t know I was until you guys helped me.”  
His retorts are always subtle jabs like this, if he doesn’t just bite.

She continue as if she hasn’t heard him “So he helped me process my application and taught me a few of the secrets the staff look for when they hire. When they’re going for non-mage types and stuff, they want people who look competent, you know?”

Tuuri prattles on like this for a few minutes, spread-eagle on her bed and perfectly aware her cousin has tuned her chatter out by now. She doesn’t care. Merely the feeling of talking with him is fine with her. It’s a way to share the sheer happiness she feels at being here- in a dorm, the way she dreamed.   
Lalli gets it. In the same way he gets she actually missed him a lot while she was in Mora on her internship.

She only stops when she hears footsteps outside in the hall, which stop in front of their door.

“I think this is us. Thirty-five” says one person “Well that took years to find.”

“It would have been a lot faster if those two guys hadn’t been clogging up the stairs with that huge trunk.”

Tuuri gets up to greet their roommates and finds Emil and Reynir outside.


	4. Equipping

As someone who saw the four of them at the tree might have predicted, the four end up becoming fast friends.  
At no point do any of them glance around at the other three and think ‘you guys will do’, and nor does any exchange like this occur between them.   
It just happens, without words to formalise it.

The first week is what they call ‘orientation’. In layman’s terms, this means they meet no one and learn nothing important, save what to do if a troll breaks into the school, or if something blows up, or if one of their classmates has an epileptic fit. 

The low-key week of orientations also serves to provide an orientation of a different kind; the students can spend some time getting to know each other. Socialising is encouraged and mostly required, by the amount of time they have to spend with each other. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are all held in the canteen, stocked with great tables that look like they were stolen from a medieval longhouse. With the number of students around, it is near impossible to find a space to eat by yourself.

On the first day, Lalli entertained thoughts of climbing a tree with his lunch, but then the blond guy, Emil, and the other two found him, and the uncertain little smile Emil gave him basically rooted him to the spot.

Besides eating, you are also surrounded by other people from the moment you wake up. Having been an only child his entire life, Emil had never had the myriad of inconveniences that come with sharing a bedroom with other people.   
Strange socks, straying into his fourth of the room. Books losing their marks, then disappearing entirely from his nightstand, only to reappear several days later on someone else’s pillow. Not being able to go into the bathroom when he wants to- and more importantly, when he needs it. Red hairs longer than his forearm, caught in the drain of the shower unit.

He kind of likes it.

On the third day, Tuuri had her first round of doubts. Her battle buddy is going to be Reynir- who was, in fact, a boy, and seemed bewildered when each of the three of them admitted in turn they had no idea what he was the first time they saw him- and Tuuri isn’t sure how much she can trust him. Reynir is nice, sure, but as far as she can tell, that’s all he is.

Sweet as a peach and nothing else. What good will that be on the battlefield?  
Then, on the fourth day of orientations, in between a talk in a cramped classroom about where explosives are allowed in the school and another one scheduled for the hall, where they’re going to be introduced to the Norn-like janitor and the code of cleanliness at the school, Reynir materialises at Tuuri’s shoulder.

She sits on the front steps. Doing nothing, for the most part. Mora is in the distance, wearing its smoky cloak, and the book open in her lap goes neglected as her glazed eyes pull the shapes rooves and the odd tower from the smoke.  
So focussed is she on spacing out, she throws her book into the air in surprise when Reynir sneaks up behind her and says.

“I just found the best thing ever.”

Tuuri lets out a little shriek. A Finnish translation of ‘The Girl with the dragon tattoo’ sails into the air. Reynir catches the book smoothly and hands it back to her, smiling his usual puppyish smile.

“Well? Come on! It’s really cool! You’ve gotta see it!”

She clutches at her hammering heart “When did you get there? Gods, you’re as bad as Lalli! Where is he, by the way?”

Reynir shrugs cheerfully “I don’t know. Wherever Emil is, I guess.”

Over the last few days, they have discovered a strange, but not unpleasant pattern; wherever one of them is, the others will eventually turn up. It is as if they were meant to go around in a quintet all the time. Magnets fill the empty space and pull those missing back before too long.  
If Tuuri doesn’t know where Lalli is, but knows where Emil is going to be, to locate her cousin all she has to do is locate Emil. The same works in reverse, when Lalli needs to find Tuuri and goes looking for Reynir instead.

“What is it, Reynir? I probably already know about it, whatever it is. I have been here for a year already, you know.”

“Not as a student.”   
He says this lightly. Tuuri bites back a retort and soothes her stung pride silently, telling herself Reynir is too sweet to know when he’s pushing someone’s buttons.

Reynir says he has only seen the place once and is a little afraid of getting lost, but he needn’t worry. It is obvious to the other three already that he has the best sense of direction among them. Working for most of one’s life as a shepherd makes for a keen sense of direction, even if he has only been down the path once, and has no landmarks to show him the way.

He leads Tuuri through the halls, half of which she has no memory of ever being in. Several times, Reynir greets strangers by first names and has his greeting returned. Tuuri has no idea how he has found the time to meet all these people, nor how she missed his apparent talent for networking.  
It is only when Reynir narrowly misses running headlong into Zainab Sakib (Professor Eide’s erstwhile favourite and therefore kind of the queen of the school) and, instead of being swatted to the ground for daring to inconvenience his senior, gets a smile and a friendly pat on the back, that Tuuri begins to suspect Reynir planned it this way.

Makes sense to her; no one is as sweet as Reynir without some kind of secret, evil ulterior motive.  
But thanks to the curiosity that got her out of Keuruu in the first place, Tuuri decides she’s going to keep following Reynir. If he has already had time to charm Zainab Sakib of all people, then he might have found something genuinely interesting.

As it turns out, he has.

“Are we going into the basement?” asks Tuuri apprehensively.

Reynir has just started down a dark and small staircase, leading to a lower floor that seems shrouded in blackness. He fumbles along the wall and flicks a light switch. A few seconds later, an old set of strip-lights sputter reluctantly to life.

“Not the basement proper. Kind of the upper-basement.”

“You know the basement is haunted, right?” she is only half-teasing “By Slenderman and honey badgers.”

Reynir shoots her a shrewd, amused look over his shoulder “Good try, Tuuri. Slenderman lives in Germany and I am waaaaay too old for him. Besides, honey badgers don’t exist.”

“Yes they do,” she protests “Onni once saw one, training with our grandma. He saw this huge bastard of an animal in the woods, with claws the size of your arm and teeth like knives!”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just saying that to keep you from wandering into the woods?”

“Well of course, but you should have seen his face when he told the story! Onni doesn’t usually make things up for the sake of it.”

They reach a landing, and Tuuri moves towards the next flight. Reynir catches her arm and points out a door she missed.   
The door is old, wooden and mostly splinters, held together by glue and determination. Reynir has only to give it the gentlest of pushes for the door to swing rapidly open and bang on the wall. Both of them flinch.

Tuuri peers into the gloom “What is this place?”

“A store-room.” Reynir searches for another light switch “Professor Madsen showed it to me the other day. Actually, I helped him carry this big load of books down here- freshly shipped in from Iceland, if you can believe it! It even smelled a little like the paper we use at home, even though this stuff was printed maybe a hundred or even a hundred and ten years ago- aha!”

He has found a chain (this storeroom is a little too basic for switches) and pulled, forcing a series of old, dusty bulbs on the ceiling to get to work. The chain spits plaster on him from the ceiling and smacks him between the eyes in punishment, as he walks into the room.

“Tuuri?”

She is frozen in the doorway.  
Her mouth hangs.

“I know, right?” he chirps “Professor Madsen said the Academy is considered one of the safest places in the Known World, because we rarely have any accidents here like fire and stuff. He told me Norwegian and Danish and Swedish military bases are always going up in flames. So when families want to store private collections, they send them here. Look at all these books!”

Tuuri cannot quite process what she is seeing.

Books. She knows books. She loves books.  
Sometimes more than her own family. In the places she lived before, there was not much in the way of books. Before Keuruu, all she had to read were the hand-written instruction manuals from as early as Year 5, regarding the best places to shoot a troll and how to judge how bad an infestation might be.  
Most of it was nonsense and speculation; techniques matured so much by the time she got her hands on the manuals, it seemed to her like trying to fish without a hook at the end of a line.

Her stories came from her grandmother’s mouth, and the occasional honey badger sighting from Onni’s. Sometimes, Lalli told her about the gods, but Tuuri has little interest in her and her family’s gods.

Even in Keuruu, her only real contact with the written word was in the form of her clerical work. Sometimes, books made a circuit around the office. Someone would bring a dog-eared copy of an old classic back from a trip abroad. If her colleagues ever noticed books didn’t tend to reappear once she had her turn, they never mentioned it.  
Her internship in Mora put her right next to a gigantic library. It also made her so frantically busy she only had time to read if she sneaked out in the middle of the night and broke in, via a small, secret passage built into the wall of the library which is occasionally used as a hidey-hole in breach-drills.

In short, Tuuri loves fiction, but fiction is to her what the sun is to an Icelander in the winter. A distant memory. Almost mythical. Totally out of reach.

And Reynir has just brought her into a storeroom half the size of the hall, nearly every inch of which is occupied by shelf upon shelf, upon box upon box, upon table upon table of books. Some, neatly sealed. Others (modern hand-written translations), strewn over scuffed tables that must be old rejects the school stores here as well.

And all of them, calling Tuuri’s name.

Essentially oblivious to the effect this wonder has had on Tuuri, Reynir continues “Professor Madsen said I can come in here and read if I want to. I’m not really supposed to show it to other people, but since he knows you- he helped you out, and everything, with your application, I thought he wouldn’t mind….are you crying?”

 

At the end of the week, something monumental happens.

Two things, actually.

Firstly, Emil finally takes it upon himself to do some cleaning. Not that he has not cleaned before- his corner is by far the least disastrous- but he has never tried his hand at some of that truly disgusting, heavy-duty stuff his roommates have become accustomed to as a skald, shepherd and secretary. 

Emil figures he has earned himself the job anyway, since he made it into the bathroom first this morning. While brushing his teeth, he happened to notice an especially long red hair sitting at the bottom of the drain of the shower. He thought about how badly the shower had drained since about the second day of his stay in Mora. Showering now involves standing in a small puddle as water struggles to get around the growing hairball clogging the drain.

Reynir has shed so much, strands of hair waft out of the drain like alien tendrils or seaweed when the puddle has grown large enough.

With this in mind, Emil spits, rinses, returns his toothbrush to the mug where all four of them live, then rolls up a sleeve and gets onto his knees.

“Tuuri, do we have a bag sitting around?”

A moment later, a balled-up paper bag bounces off Emil’s crown.

“Find another hairball?” she asks.

“Of sorts, yes.”

“Wasn’t me.” says Lalli, sounding bleary and slow.

“I know. It’s Reynir’s hair.”

Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity is also known to strongly affect the Hotakainens, who assemble in the doorway to watch Emil at his grisly work. Tuuri wretches at the back of her throat.

Lalli mutters “I’ve had bigger.”

With a flourish, Emil extracts a damp, two-foot piece of hair approximately the size and shape of a riding crop “I doubt that. If you had anything as substantial as this, you’d need surgery to get rid of it.”

He stuffs the hair into the bag and balls it up. The bottom of the bag grows wet, so Emil wraps it in a plastic bag and ties it shut. Then, he tosses it to Lalli and without meaning to, starts an impromptu game of ball. Reverse keep-away, if you will.

So when Reynir rushes in, flushed from his excited news, his roommates are too swatting at a bag of his hair with textbooks, or throwing their arms up in front of their face for protection to hear him. Reynir is patient, however, and experienced in capturing the attention of animals with short attention spans. He sticks two fingers in his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle.

Everyone freezes in the instant. Undefended, Tuuri is smacked on the arm by the bag of wet hair, hard enough that it splits at a little tendril of red entrails snakes from the rip.

“What are you doing?” he still pants from his run “What is this, guys?”

“It’s a situation that escalated a little too quickly.” says Emil, brushing some hair from his eyes and dropping his Modern History book on his bed “What’s with you? Why is your hair all,” he gestures around his own head, indicating a poof of unruly hair has leaked from Reynir’s braid.

He attempt to finger-comb the worst offenders back into the braid, unsuccessfully “Because I was running. I had to get here to tell you guys the greatest thing.”

“What?” asks Tuuri “Are they giving us our reading lists?”

“No, better! They’re giving us our cats!”

Reynir takes a second to let this information sink in. Then, realising the others are more apprehensive than excited, he is crestfallen. 

“You guys aren’t excited about the cats?”

“I have a cat.” says Emil “At home. In Östersund.”   
“This is a battle cat. You know. One to sniff out trolls and fight them, sometimes.” says Tuuri, stretching her arms over her head “What’s so exciting about that? Getting a cat?”

Reynir is dumbstruck “What do you mean, what’s exciting? Cats are exciting! Cats are amazing!”

“Yeah, but the novelty kind of wears off. I mean, we get a cat in here-”

“Two,” corrects Reynir “One for each pair.”

Tuuri looks even less excited now than ever before “Cats are also territorial. Like some skalds I know,” she shoots Lalli a venomous look, as if he has already somehow inconvenienced her “You guys think Lalli was bad before with his hairballs and his scratching the furniture?”

Reynir shrugs “No, not really.”

“Strange, but not bad.” adds Emil.

Tuuri either didn’t hear them or didn’t care about their contributions, because she continues like they have just nodded enthusiastically “Wait ‘til he gets it in his head there’s a cat here to take over his territory. You’re gonna be a real pill, aren’t you, Lalli?”

His grey eyes expand to the size of saucers “Pill?”

“No, not like that-”

But before Tuuri can explain the contextual differences, Lalli has climbed out of the window and started up the drainpipe. It takes them fifteen minutes and several feet of rope (read ‘rope’ as ‘bedsheets tied together in confounding knots Reynir normally uses to keep his braid from unravelling at the ends’) to get him back down, and by that time, the students have begun to collect in the hall for the occasion.

 

The cats live in a kind of dungeon.

Not a literal dungeon, where criminals would be thrown in the time of kings and the like, and there would be torture equipment decorating the walls like the boy-band posters of an Old World child. However, the vibe coming off the place is pretty similar.

The cats are not locked up. Instead, they lie on an array of raised platforms, scratching post and beds and blankets. Most of the older ones are asleep or pretending to be, so as not to interact with the humans that have just arrived. Around them, a veritable herd of kittens stampede this way and that, tumbling over each other and falling over and trying to wake up their elders with friendly bites on the tail.

“This is the cat room, anyway,” says a tired-looking professor called Eliasson “I wish we had a better name for these things, but we don’t spend our time coming up with names for things. We’re more worried about survival and passing inspection and all of that stuff.”

In order to keep some form of basic order, the groups have been coming up in fours as roommates. The idea being that for the next five weeks, the kittens will be living in the room (complete with litter trays in the bathroom, needing a clean-up almost daily) to get to know their new partners. The children, too, have to learn how to deal with the cats.

These are not the tame puffballs some of them may have been raised knowing (says Professor Eliasson, with a pointed look at Emil), but powerful animals, bred for the work of detecting and combatting trolls and descended from generations of cats bred for the same work.

“Now, you already have had your cats assigned to you,” here, he pauses for a short hysterical giggle and to wipe a lone tear from his eyes “Which one of you is Västerström?”

Emil raises his hand.

“Excellent.”

The teacher strides fearlessly into the throng of tumbling kittens. In less than two seconds, five of them have sunk their claws into his breeches and are on their way up either of his legs. Another jumps from one of the platforms and hangs off his back.  
If he notices these kittens, then he gives no sign.

He stoops and scoops up a small, rotund kitten with a splash of ginger across the nose, and an entirely black body apart from that.

“Where is the other one.” he mutters to himself.

Another kitten leaps for him and lands on his chest, hanging there like a bat from a tree.

“There it is.”

Plucking the second kitten from his sweater, Professor Eliasson makes his way back to the students. He thrusts the kitten with the ginger spot on its nose at Emil. Immediately, the kitten clings to the front of Emil’s shirt. The look in its eyes is somewhere between feral and curious.

“This is Einar.” he hands the second kitten to Reynir, who looks like he has just died and gone to heaven “And this is Egil.”

“Einar,” repeats Tuuri “Like the einherjar?”

“Probably. Let them out at seven in the morning for feeding, then again at six at night. They will know where to go and they are trained to return immediately afterwards. Don’t ask me how I trained these tiny bundles of joy to go back to a place they’ve never been before. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. And don’t squeeze them. They may be bred to kill the most horrifying scourge on the face of the planet, but they’re still babies. Fragile babies.”

He excuses them with a flourish. 

Emil puts Einar on his shoulder, supporting its lower half with a palm.

“It’s staring at me.” reports Lalli.

“It’s a cat. They do that. They don’t have social cues like us. Staring is fine for them. But…but kind of not for us, so, uh, can you not make that face at me?”

“He’s making it at the cat,” says Tuuri “Not you. Expect a lot of that until they get used to each other.”

“How long is that going to take?”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

Einar draws their ears back and hisses at Lalli, who responds in kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of us not familiar with the Scandinavian myths and such, I suggest you search the cats' names for an indication of how ironic or accurate their names are going to be. 
> 
> (hint: extreme irony)


	5. First day

Lessons start the following week.

Sigrun Eide, who tells her students to call her ‘sir’ or ‘that bitch’, as they are likely to begin referring to her soon, takes the first lesson of the day.

She has the class assemble in light jackets and long trousers on the snowy training field. There is not a single one among them who is not shivering so violently their teeth are chattering, except for Lalli, who gets a lot of weird stares because of this. Lined up in three rows, the students shift from foot to foot, trying to stamp some of the warmth back into their bodies. Professor Eide stands at the top of a gentle slope, which declines into the training-field proper. At the moment, the equipment is still lightly dusted with snow; the janitors have not yet had the chance to clean them up.

“Some of you- most of you are wondering why the hell we even have one of these,” she gestures behind her, at the various obstacle courses and track fields “Outside, in the snow? What were we thinking? We were thinking about the same thing you will be once you’re Cleansers and Mages for real. We were thinking ‘we need to get these kids acclimated to the cold’, while a few years from now, you’re all going to be thinking ‘thank the gods my evil teachers got me acclimated to the cold, or I wouldn’t be able to do my job right now’. Let me tell you Cleansers out there. Just because you’re carrying around a flamethrower does not mean you will stay warm. In fact, it means you’re going to lose a lot more heat. Vasodilation and that shit. If you want the specifics, ask the nurse.”

Tuuri extracts a hand from the depths of her pocket and raises it, asking “What nurse?”

“Exactly,” Professor Eide grins “Hi, Tuuri, how’s life?”

“A bit cold.”

“It’s gonna get colder.”

Her eyes land on Lalli beside her. Lalli, who seems to be so disconnected with what’s going on around with him his eyes are closing and his head, drooping, as he prepares to drop off to sleep on the spot.

Sigrun notices this immediately. She snaps her fingers and points to him. Lalli’s eyes fly open and he straightens up.

“You.”

Lalli glances from side-to-side, hoping she is not referring to him.

“The other Hotakainen.”

“Me.” confirms Lalli.

“How many years were you a scout?”

He gives her a suspicious look. Lalli has not quite grasped the idea of his career history being condensed into a few sheets of paper, stapled together and slipped into a file for the reading convenience of his teachers. He assumes they are all stalking him and spying on him somehow, and has grown increasingly paranoid. He will no longer discuss his family with the others unless he has first checked around them for people standing too close, or glanced under the table for any hidden microphones.

But, as instructed by Tuuri (with a solemn promise of a Grandma-style whopping if he fudged it on purpose), Lalli behaves with as much respect and compliance as his scant social skills will allow him.  
She told him he was going to have to act relatively normal around Sigrun, or she would take it as a challenge to her authority and possibly try fighting him.

So he answers simply and honestly “Five years. Since I was ten.”

She raises an eyebrow, impressed “You want to know how I knew you were a scout?”

Lalli nods.

“The way you bear the cold. Look at your classmates,” she gestures around the shivering rows. Lalli turns his head obediently.

He seems surprised by the chattering teeth, now that he has noticed it, and looks to Emil for explanation.

Emil speaks through gritted teeth “It’s freezing. It’s so many degrees below I can’t feel my face.”

Sigrun scoffs good-naturedly “It’s only minus two! Anyway, I want the rest of you to look to Hotakainen Two as your example. To make it as a scout, or a mage, or whatever, you’re going to need to be as acclimatised to the cold as a polar bear.”

Reynir puts up his hand.

“Yes. You, the androgynous one with the braid.”

“I’m a boy,” he clarifies “Um, aren’t we at risk of frost-bite? And, uh, hypothermia? I was a shepherd for four years and a lot of my friends, my, um, other shepherd friends got sick from being out in the cold. And they were all dressed in furs,” he plucks miserably at his single, cotton layer “What happens if we’re frost-bitten?”

“Then you lose a finger, a toe, or one of those other expendable appendages. That is, of course, assuming Mama Nature doesn’t really fuck you over and take off a whole leg. Are you sure you’re a boy, by the way?”

Reynir is so horrified by the answer to his tentative question it takes him half a minute to recover “Uh, yes. I’m sure.”

“Well dammit. That’s another bet Mikkel won. Bastard! He must be clairvoyant or something, this is just too many times...” She pulls a battered piece of paper from her pocket and scrawls something on it with a pen plucked from behind her ear.

“That’s her revenge list,” whispers Tuuri to Emil “She makes a list of all the slights against her honour so she can punch the people responsible later, or something.”

“She is correct,” says Sigrun, still bent over her list “I make lists. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Most of them are bad, actually, but that’s enough about me,” she stashes the paper in her pocket and points to Lalli again “Hotakainen Two! No, that’s too long. I’m going to call you Junior. Tuuri, you’re Senior. Junior, take the lead. Fifteen laps, please, and anyone who falls over has to do another five.”

As the groan goes up, Emil glances at the field they are to run on “But there’s ice out there!”

“I know,” she grins wickedly “I hosed the field down last night. Go on, soldiers, get to it!”

“That bitch.” mutters someone behind Emil.

 

“I think I have frost-bite. Does this look frost-bitten to you?” asks Reynir two and a half hours later, thrusting his reddened fingers in Lalli’s face.

The sudden movement startles Lalli. He jumps back so hard he knocks over his chair backwards. For a moment, all they can see of him is a blur of silver and wood, then his legs are folded over the toppled chair, and he lays on his back, utterly exhausted and defeated.

“No.” says Lalli “You’re fine.”

He bats Reynir away when he tries to help him up, preferring to stay on the ground, with his legs at a right angle to the rest of him. Apparently, this is the position Lalli tends to assume anyway when dealing with serious discouragement.

It is a half hour after their first training session. As Tuuri predicted, three people cried. These people, Sigrun threw a plastic pack of tissues at (which usually bounced off the sides of heads before they could be caught) and told them to keep going, to stay strong, and that they had the most phenomenal piece of snot hanging out of their nose.  
None of the four of them cried. From sorrow, anyway. 

At one point, Reynir found himself completely unable to get back to his feet after falling over for the umpteenth time. The rest of the class had to skirt around him while he slipped and slid and struck acrobatic positions as he tried to regain his footing.  
Finally, Emil took pity on him. He planted his feet in the relative solidity of the nearby snowbank and caught Reynir by the braid, then gently pulled him over, using the braid like the rope of a boat he was pulling in to dock. Gentle as Emil was, the backwards force proved too much for Reynir. His legs shot out from under him and he finished the trip on his back, looking utterly resigned to his fate.

Tuuri laughed so hard she, too, had to take one of Sigrun’s ready pack of tissues to clean up something she snorted in her mirth.

All told, they ran for about two hours.  
Emil ended up with fifty laps. Lalli had only twenty, but got bored on the sidelines, so elected to join in and stop for breaks at his leisure. Mostly, he stayed in stride with Emil. They ran in a companionable silence, until Emil would lose his footing and Lalli would have to stop to give him a pitying look as he struggled upright again.

Tuuri made it all the way to seventy with the help of some extraordinarily graceless balance, and Reynir beat the class all-time record, with his stunt on the ice.  
He reached three hundred thirty five laps, a hundred of which he had completed with some surprisingly agile sprinting and a lot of willpower, by the time Sigrun blew her whistle and ended the class.

When Reynir asked her when she wanted him to come back to finish his laps, she beamed at him.

“Kid, you just fell over sixty-four times. You’ve done enough today. Now go see to those bruises.”

Reynir is very bruised. When he lifted up his shirt in the changing rooms, everyone gasped and gathered around to pick out the worst and biggest of the batch.

“What the hell is this?” asked one of the students who Reynir didn’t know, pointing to a wicked scar on his left hip.

Reynir twisted around to see what he was talking about “That? I pissed off a ram. They look really cute, but they’re mean as all get out when they’ve got it in your head that you’re a challenger to their ewes.”

Someone else noticed a similar scar, this one on Emil’s stomach. When he was asked, he turned red and muttered “My appendix,” and hastily pulled a sweater on to cover himself.

Seeing as it was their first training session of the entire year, the students have been granted a free period to nurse their wounds.  
In another half hour, they will be expected to gather themselves up and drag their weary corpses down to the lecture hall for a class with Professor Madsen.

Emil doesn’t look like he will be moving any time in the next century. He crawled into bed the moment they got back to their room. Now, he lies in a bundle under the covers. Einar sits on top of the blankets and swipes here and there with his (Reynir checked) claws out, attempting either to flay his new owner through the sheets, or to get under there with him. He staunchly ignores Lalli a few feet away, who has been laying unresponsive on the floor for the entire time.  
The cat and the skald have struck up a tenuous truce, maintained mostly be refusing to acknowledge each other.

If having a small cat trying to peel the skin from his bones through his blankets bothers him, Emil shows no signs of it.  
He is dead asleep.

Tuuri sits on her bed, cross-legged, her elbow pressed against a hot water bottle. At the end of nearly all seventy of her falls, she barked her elbow. She is not sure how or why her elbow has suddenly become the main break-fall of her body- not when there are so many spongier, softer areas which would absorb the shock far better, especially around the middle- but she is too excited to complain or wonder aloud.

“I cannot wait for Ancient-Modern History!” she chirps “I mean, the name is, like, a logical contradiction and it kind of doesn’t make sense to teach them alongside each other, but who cares? I’m so excited! Professor Madsen is so cool! He always gets the class to open by having someone from every row tell an urban from their home-town, then he traces it all the way back to the Ancient context. Isn’t that amazing? What would you talk about?”

Reynir thinks for a moment “Probably wolves.”

“I’m going to tell about honey badgers.”

“No, not wolves,” says Reynir “Svartalf!”

Tuuri frowns “Aren’t those Norwegian myths?”

He grows suddenly very serious “They’re not a myth! I’ve seen them before. Let me tell you, Tuuri, you see some weird things when you have to go tromping around the Icelandic wilderness in the dead of night, whistling for lost sheep. Sometimes things whistled back to me-”

She throws a pillow at him, misses, and smacks Einar right off of Emil “Don’t tell me anymore! Save it for class, alright?”

“Alright, alright- oh, hello, who’s in my lap? Is it you? Is it Egil?” 

The smaller kitten has plodded into Reynir’s lap, appearing from nowhere. She (Tuuri checked) was apparently attracted by the indignant hisses made by her brother as he attempts to scramble back up onto the blankets to renew his attack, and makes short work of the climb from the floor to Reynir’s bed.

Egil is the calmer of the two cats. At least, Reynir has pronounced her as this. Secretly, Tuuri and the other two have agreed she is by far the dumber. Physically, a Class A all the way. Mentally, less of a cat, and more like a bird after it has stunned itself by flying smack into a window it thought was a patch of clear air.  
Einar, on the other hand, is definitely a Class A in mind and body. They are just not sure if he is actually a cat, or some kind of small, lesser demon disguising himself in the form of a cat so that he may torment the common mortal. Even Reynir recognises Einar as malicious and evil, but this has not stopped Reynir from cuddling the kitten. The scars criss-crossing his hands prove it.

“Who’s a pretty cat?” coos Reynir, scratching the cat gently behind a downy ear “Who’s the prettiest girl-cat ever? Is it Egil?”

Egil purs, her eyes rolling back into their sockets.

“Yes it is! She’s the prettiest cat, isn’t she?” he glances over at Einar “Girl-cat, I mean. You’re still very pretty Einar.”

Einar hisses at him.  
Roused by what he takes to be a territorial noise, Lalli jolts up suddenly. He rolls onto his stomach and glares at the cat. The cat glares back. Its fur rises up in spikes along the ridge of its spine. Reynir watches Lalli intently, hoping his hair will do something similar.

Then Lalli lies back down and averts his eyes from the cat, muttering “Wake me when we’re leaving.”

 

Emil has a blind moment of panic, during his first History lesson.

He was not really listening to the professor when he called upon him. Sure, he was staring, and must have appeared to be making eye-contact as well. Emil was trying to place the man. He knows he has seen the face before. Not necessarily attached to the man who wears it currently, but he knows the face.

He knows the name as well, doesn’t he?  
Madsen? He knows a Madsen. Another Madsen. A blonder Madsen with less of a chin and no side-burns.

Emil is working his way through the possibilities (his parents’ grocer? One of their high-society friends?) when he becomes aware his name has been said and all eyes in the room have turned on him intently.  
This is when his heart plummets, as he realises he has no idea what he is supposed to be doing.

Fortunately for him, Professor Madsen is merciful “Were you somewhere else, Cadet Västerström?”

He does not quite have the courage to admit he thinks the professor might be the milkmaid who lived down the road from his family’s summer house, so he just nods and makes something up “I’m just a little tired, sir.”

“Tired,” he repeats ironically “Is one of the milder euphemisms I have ever heard for Professor Eide’s particular brand of torture. You’re a brave one for using it. Which one of you slipped 64 times?”

Without hesitation, Reynir sticks his hand up “That would be me!”

The class titters. It might have been a full-blown, derisive laugh, but half of the class are still too wounded to move their mouths, and the others are too tired to put in the effort.

Reynir is in the row behind Emil and Lalli, next to Tuuri, both of whom are practically bouncing in their seats in excitement. If Reynir’s smile gets any bigger, it will split his face in half and the top of his head will go sliding off. This is what Emil imagines, anyway.

“Congratulations. You have broken the all-time record of the five years Professor Eide has stalked these hallowed halls. And I do mean stalked.” those familiar blue eyes turn back on Emil “You were saying something, Västerström?”

Emil goes blank again.

“Urban legends.” whispers Lalli.

“Oh. Uh. Oh. I don’t know. My home town is kind of boring. We just have the ghost stuff and phantom trolls like every other town has for legends.” he racks his brains for something interesting to say “My Aunt Siv saw a svartalf once.”

“Me too!” exclaims Reynir, suddenly deadly serious “Was she whistling?”

Professor Madsen clears his throat “Perhaps you two can discuss your elf sightings later. Right now we’re interested in local mythology. Where is your home town?”

Emil gestures vaguely north, unsure of which way it is from here “Östersund.”

“Ah. Raised on the Storsjön, then?”

Emil decides he might as well answer honestly “Kind of. I played there as a child. Fished. Fell through the ice one winter.”

Tuuri snorts. He swivels around to glare at her, and in that moment, her smug, round face reminds him of something. The flash of inspiration is cosmic. A rush of child hood memories come back to him.  
It was on the day he fell through the ice, coincidentally, that he first heard this story. His mother may or may not have told him this as they warmed him in front of the hearth to keep him from straying too far from the home again, lest she lose him to the lake. And not be the one to push him herself. 

“There was a legend the parents told their children to keep us close to the hearths. A polar bear- they said a polar bear had been taken by the sickness and gone mad with hunger. It thinks if it feeds the Rash, then the Rash will go away or something like that. Anyway, the idea is that this polar bear roams the walls at night looking for fresh prey. Child-sized prey, because adults are always armed. And it eats people, I guess.”

A beat of silence.

“Interesting.” says Professor Madsen.

Emil senses he has sorely disappointed someone, but is not sure who.

Lucky for him, Reynir is practically bursting with his excitement to share his story. When it becomes apparent that he might pop out of his seat if he is made to wait much longer, Professor Madsen allows him to speak.

Reynir launches into a convoluted story about how he once saw this svartalf and how it was totally weird, how the thing whistled to him for about an hour while he was trying to find the prize ewe of the flock that had wandered off and how he narrowly escaped with both his life and his sheep. About halfway into the story, Emil loses interest.

He puts his head down on his desk, wincing as his collection of bruises complain with pangs of pain. Everything hurts. For a long time, everything is going to ache. The worst part is knowing he will have to hit the training field first thing tomorrow morning- again, stripped practically naked against the cold and with nothing to keep him on his feet but his willpower.

A willpower which, up to this point in time, has not been sorely tested by the trials of life.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he should have protested against this more than he did.

Lalli shifts in his seat beside him. Gently, he raises Emil’s head from the desk and slips a folded sweater underneath his head.

“You can copy my notes later.” he whispers, patting Emil on the back of the head.

Then again, the Academy might not be such a bad place to spend the next four years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time-jump in the next chapter, because I can I guess?


	6. Correspondence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, we get to find out some of the following things
> 
> \- the nature of Mikkel's family, including a clue as to who that startlingly familiar milk-maid type Emil once saw might be  
> \- how badly Sigrun's parents want a grandchild  
> \- Mikkel is in fact a childish baby-man when faced with certain siblings  
> -how Reynir refers to his family members  
> -that Lalli apparently prefers to communicate in post-scripts, rather than sitting down and writing his beleaguered cousin a proper letter.

Árnason Farm, Iceland

27/4/87

Dear Mom, Dad, Big Sister, Big Brother, Bigger Sister, Bigger Brother

I made it home safe, like I said I would.

You guys are too worried about me! I’m a trained mage now, remember? I met Tuuri and Lalli (my fellow mage! Even though he’s Finnish, not Icelandic, so his magic is really confusing) at the port and we took the train into Mora. I wasn’t worried at all, though, about using the train, even though there have been some attacks this summer.

Lalli did this cool incantation thing before we got on the train- the moon came out from behind the clouds and everything. It was amazing. I watched the countryside of Sweden go by and I even saw some troll bodies on the electric fence. Bigger Brother and Sister were out in the wilderness I passed through this year, right? Maybe some of the troll bodies were your fault! I wouldn’t be surprised!  
Bigger Sister, what’s your kill count right now? I’m telling everyone it’s forty-two, so you have to tell me if I get to up the ante and brag even more about my family.

Speaking of kill counts, my roommate/History tutor/ friend Emil (the ‘blond poof’, Big Sister, as you remember him from the day you dropped me off) did his work experience this summer with Professor Sigrun Eide’s outfit in the Norwegian countryside, and the first thing we noticed when he met us at the train station was a patch over one eye!  
We all thought he’d lost it! Lalli started to freak out and Tuuri was so surprised she actually threw up! 

He had to lift the bandage to show us this big cut above his eyebrow to make us believe he still had two eyes. He got a lot of stitches. Apparently, he got swept right off his feet by a troll and knocked into a tree. He said if he’d passed out, he probably would have died.  
Lalli got mad at Professor E, saying that it was her job to train him, not feed the trolls, and how she promised she was going to be careful with Emil this equinox, but Emil told him he was alright for most of the time. That troll just sneaked up on them and it couldn’t be helped, apparently.

Tuuri’s never been to Sweden, so she made him tell her all about Dalsnes (where he was for the equinox), and he said it’s pretty medieval back there. Everyone carries swords and knives all the time. They all wear furs and drink even their orange juice out of this big wooden chalices. He said eating breakfast was like going back in time to a Viking longhouse.  
Professor E’s mom and dad (she talks about them a lot in class, and we all call them Mr and Mrs General) were really nice to Emil. They said they liked him a lot, and they wished Professor E would hurry up and get married so she could give him a grandchild like him.

Professor E even threatened to adopt him a few times, which Emil said he’d be fine with! Those two are kind of like best friends. He even calls her Sigrun now- her first name, like the Valkyrie- but he’s going to stop when we get back to school, otherwise people will think it’s weird.

Oh, I didn’t mention this, but we’re not back at school yet. School dorms don’t open until tomorrow, so we’re spending the night with Emil’s aunt and uncle. Remember I told them about you in some of my letters during last year. Emil goes down every weekend to see them. He has the cutest cousins ever!

Tuuri and Lalli’s brother is also here. He had to come back early from the equinox to get some work done in Mora, with their cousin, Taru Hollola, who’s some kind of military strategist, but he was still in Mora when they got here.  
The three of them went out for a walk a half hour ago, so as I write this, it’s pretty much just me and Emil sitting in the living room with the family cat (Bosse- he’s cute, but not as cute as Einar and Egil!). 

Their big brother, Onni, is a mage like me and Lalli. He and Lalli were talking about luontos (spirit animals, Mom, I told you I would find out what it means) and apparently, he’s an owl. Owls are super-impressive luontos to have, you know! Like, how cool would it be to have something that can fly? Mine- more like a spirit animal guide thingie- is just a dog, kind of like the one we had when I was really, really little? Lalli’s changes all the time. He told me mine had the same hair as me, which I thought was funny.

Oh, hair! Tuuri shaved her head again over the equinox, so she’s back to looking all downy like a baby bird’s wing. She was starting to look really shaggy towards the end of the term.

Ok, I have to go now, because Emil says dinner is ready soon and we have to go get the Hotakainens back from wherever they went. I will write again soon. As soon as I get back in my dorm.

Your loving littlest brother and son,

Reynir 

 

Mrs Madsen  
Madsen Farm  
Bornholm  
Denmark

27/ 4/ 87

Mother,

In answer to your questions, no, I am not dating Sigrun and I do not intend to start dating Sigrun any time in the near future. Please read ‘near future’ as ‘ever’, and stop asking me about it.

The Academy opened again yesterday. I have eighteen hours and counting before a bunch of sun-burnt children stream in, wanting to tell me all about their equinoxes. The four you refer to as my ‘ducklings’ (presumably because they follow me around? Or because the weight I put on this year somehow makes my shape duck-like to your critical eye?) have yet to touch base with Sigrun or I (If they are the ducklings and I am the father duck, then I suppose Sigrun would be the odd mongoose which for some reason adopted the family instead of slaughtering us all), but we remain optimistic that none of them are dead.

Emil is recovering from his equinox with Sigrun, if one can ever truly recover from personal time with Sigrun. You may remember that he was thrown about thirty feet into a tree? According to Sigrun, he sprang back up and jumped into the fray again. Of course, afterwards, he went absolutely stupid with a concussion, but there you go.  
Determination.

I will check back in at the end of this week, hopefully with more gossip for you about the students. I know it’s like one of those old TV shows for you. My life, I mean.

Watch out for pieces of father, and give my love to the little ones when they get home from their camping trip. Assuming they survive.  
Kidding.

(one of)Your son(s),

Mikkel

 

Ms Mikkela Madsen  
Department of International Agriculture  
Reykjavík  
Iceland

24/4/87

Fuck you too. I’ve been telling people you’re the evil twin for our entire lives, but have I been heard? Go ahead and prove it, you raving lunatic. I should have eaten you in the womb.

Mikkel

 

Captain and Captain Eide  
Barrack Eight  
Dalsnes, Norway

28/4/87

Dear Mom and Dad,

To answer your questions in order:

1) I am not pregnant  
2) I do not intend to get pregnant in the near future  
3) Mikkel and I are still not dating  
4) Mikkel is fine, thanks, and sends his regards

And a bonus:

5) Stop. Asking. Me. When. I. Will. Get. Pregnant.

Just adopt a child, if you want a grandchild so badly. I have trolls to kill and papers to grade. There is no room in my life for a child right now, alright? I already have about fifty I see on a daily basis.

Right now, I’m back in Mora. The Academy opened yesterday and the kids are all settling in. I’ve already met with my favourite students and heard about their equinoxes (Reynir saw another svartalf, Tuuri read some books, and Lalli got chased for eight kilometres by a Rash-sick deer, who he apparently didn’t want to kill because he thinks deer are gross and didn’t want to touch it. I am just learning and yes, I did laugh in his face), and my bags are unpacked.

The Valkyrie has landed.

All is well. My hand is getting better and I don’t find blood in the tissues when I sneeze anymore. I love you both and I will see you next summer, for the longer hunting season.

Save some Giants for me, alright?

Your loving and empty-wombed daughter, 

Sigrun

 

Ms Mikkela Madsen  
Department of International Agriculture  
Reykjavík  
Iceland

28/4/87

No, you fuck off. 

Mikkel

 

Västerström Household  
Östersund  
Sweden 

29/4/87

 

I’m back at the Academy. The concussion cleared up and I didn’t lose my eye. 

You know, in case you were interested in the fate of your only son.

E.

 

Ms Mikkela Madsen  
Department of International Agriculture  
Reykjavík  
Iceland

29/4/87

What do you mean I’m the evil twin? I distinctly remember YOU, sister dear, as the one who took immense pleasure in pushing me into the river every single thaw since we turned six. Almost all of my near death experiences can be traced back to you and your shenanigans, and that includes the troll-related incidents.

Also, what about that time you made me eat yew berries just to see if they were really poisonous? That was an assassination attempt. No two ways about it.

You’re the evil one.

Mikkel

 

Skald Onni Hotakainen  
Barrack Ten  
Keuruu  
Finland 

30/ 4/87

Onni,

Your nightmares are loud. They’re waking me up from the other side of the country. 

Tuuri and I are fine. We’re not dying, we’re not starving, we’re not failing all of our classes and we’re not being murdered by janitorial staff.

Stop dreaming about us dying. It’s confusing when I wake up, and you’re giving me nightmares too. I share a room with three other people. There’s only so much second-hand screaming I’ll get away with before they make me wear a ball gag to sleep.

So knock it off.

Lalli

P.S. We love you! Please don’t cry because you had to go back home! And don’t mind Lalli; we don’t mind him screaming. Besides, he’s not really screaming. It’s more like he rolls around a lot and falls out of bed.

P.P.S. You have to come up to see Taru in three months anyway, so we’ll see you then!

Love from Tuuri

 

Ms Mikkela Madsen  
Department of International Agriculture  
Reykjavík  
Iceland

30/4/87

I know you are, but what am I?

Mikkel

 

Árnason Farm, Iceland

Dear Everyone,

1/5/87

It was a really cool day today! Emil just turned sixteen, so we made a big fuss out of him. It was especially nice because classes won’t start until two days from now, so we could all relax and just enjoy ourselves. His family already gave him all of his things and a package to open up on the day, so we got to eat some more of his aunt’s great cooking and to see all the things they’d given him.

More pencils, of course, because Emil can draw really well. I’ve gotten his permission to put one of the drawings in this envelope- he drew me! I didn’t even know he drew us, but apparently he doesn’t like people to know he’s doing them because then they’ll want posing and all that stuff. He did a sneaky one of me getting ready in the morning.

Anyway, I had a good day today and I just wanted to let you guys know. I know you’re all worried sick about me up here, all on my lonesome, but I promise I’m doing really well. Sure, I have bad days and good days, but I’ve always got three awesome friends (and two cats!) to help me out on the bad ones.  
It’s like being at home, kind of. We’re kind of like a family now. Not that I need any more brothers or sisters! 

with love from the Littlest Árnason,

Reynir

 

(The drawing is a simple, realistic one depicting Reynir combing his hair on a set of steps.  
On the back, a cartoonish Reynir rides an over-sized ram, wields a shepherd’s crook, and screams ‘FORWARDS FLOSSY’)

 

Västerström Household  
Östersund  
Sweden 

My papers came in two days ago. Everything is here but the birth certificate. If we’re going to do this without a big scandal hanging over us, then we need to do it right. Please look again, and if you can’t find it, then we’ve got a big problem.  
This process would go a whole lot faster if you would just cooperate with Siv and Torbjörn. They are doing you a favour, after all. All you have to do from this point is pay my school fees and dodge the questions your friends ask about me.

A few months after this is all done, if you want to fake my death for the Östersund high society then that’s fine with me. Just know that it could be embarrassing, because I don’t plan to die anytime soon.

And if you’re going to go out of your way to send me an insulting package on my birthday, the least you could do is spell my name right.  
I know it was Dad. I still recognise his handwriting.

(The letter was enclosed with a package, marked for ‘return to sender’  
The package was empty apart from this letter)

 

Ms Mikkela Madsen  
Department of International Agriculture  
Reykjavík  
Iceland

2/5/87

Are you sure it’s the same Mahiru? I know there aren’t exactly an abundance of people named Mahiru in Iceland, but there might be at least two? 

If it really is him, then calm down. I’m sure he doesn’t remember all those embarrassing things you did back in school. Or if he does, he thinks it was me. We did look exactly alike until puberty finally caught up with you, so anything that happened before we turned seventeen or when we were wearing those horrible matching coats is probably far from his mind.

Personally, I think you should ask him out. If one of us two starts dating, it might get Mother to shut up about the other one. I have no designs to start dating any time soon. I’m raising about fifty children right now. There’s no room in my life for anymore drama. Too many papers to grade.  
And the kids are making me look incredibly bad by landing their first boyfriends. What is this I hear about the Baby getting engaged?

If you don’t ask him out for yourself, then do it for me. You know what I mean.

Good luck, anyway, with the new colleague.

And to continue our earlier conversation: no, you stop writing, then I’ll stop writing, but I won’t be the first person to stop writing.  
And you did so feed me yew berries. I had to get my stomach pumped. Ask the ancients. Sis should at least remember it, since she was the one who took me to the doctor’s.

 

Västerström Household  
Mora  
Sweden

Dear Aunt S and Uncle T,

So this is everything. They sent over all the papers, and the form was signed too. I am officially emancipated from them and am now your problem.

They’re still going to pay for my school fees because it will be more convenient than having to pull me out, so there’s a plus. If it’s possible for you, I could come down this weekend to talk about it all? I’d like to, anyway. I kind of need to talk about this to someone. It doesn’t feel real yet.

My eye is fine, by the way, and I’ve already gotten my head checked for brain damage. So it was by a Norwegian doctor without any equipment to speak of beyond ‘intuition’, but I trusted them. Intuition is good for me. The bandage comes off tomorrow. I’m going to have a hideous scar, though. 

Give my love to the kids and Bosse

yours (legally now),

Emil 

 

Captain and Captain Eide  
Barrack Eight  
Dalsnes, Norway

2/5/87

Mom and Dad,

Just checking in before I have to start teaching again

Here’s a list of things you should know:

1) Still not pregnant; no heir to the Eide dynasty in sight  
2) Getting a pay raise this year  
3) Emil’s bandage has come off and he has got the most wicked scar above his eyebrow  
4) One of the trainee cats (Tuuri and Reynir’s, incidentally) climbed on top of the roof this morning, got stuck, and brought the whole school together to watch the skinny Finnish scout (Lalli) get it down  
It was a beautiful bonding moment. Tears of pride wiped all around  
5) I’m not ready to turn 29, send help and a fountain of youth  
6) One of the kids apparently saw a honey badger in the woods the other day  
7) Another of the kids apparently saw a svartalf in the same woods on the same day  
8) I got my first papercut of the term 

 

That’s all for now

Loving+ unfertilised daughter,

Sigrun

 

Scout Onni Hotakainen  
Barrack Ten  
Keuruu  
Finland

Onni,

We miss you a lot already! Lessons are about to start, so it’s going to be harder to write as much. But please keep writing us every week. Me and Lalli love getting your letters (I know, because he collects them and sleeps with them in a paper folder in his pillow-case), and it keeps us feeling close to home. And to you, of course!

I’m so excited to be back at the Academy! Not just because I’m back at the book room (read: ‘PARADISE!!’), but because I really feel like I’m achieving something here!

Ok, so I haven’t lost any weight the way I thought Professor Eide’s training programme from Hel herself was going to do for me, but that’s ok. I’ve come to accept that my rolls are a part of me and it’s unreasonable to compare oneself to cousin that looks two-dimensional when he turns sideways in the first place.  
And anyway, Emil told me this really encouraging thing I’d never thought of before. We’re just designed for the cold, he said, since he’s kind of on the heavy side as well (not as much as you and me, though). He said I should think of my extra weight like blubber. Of course I almost smacked him upside the head when he said that, since I thought he was just being fresh. But then I considered it.

Designed for the cold? I get it. I mean, our whole family was born in the cold and we’ve lived in the cold for generations. So it does make sense that having some extra weight would just become a thing that our families did, for insulation. Right?  
Tell me I’m not going crazy!

Anyway, when we got back, the cats were super excited. Egil is a sweetheart and she was just rubbing her cheek on everyone and nuzzling us all. Einar was an asshole, as usual, and the first thing he did was bite Lalli on the leg. Lalli picked him up and nipped him on the tip of his tail, though, so now Einar knows there’s no chance of him becoming the alpha cat this term.

 

Ok, you’re probably wondering if I’m going to admit what I did.  
And I will!

I know you really didn’t want to touch those applications for the Department of International Communications. I know it was kind of evil to tuck them into your luggage. Lalli had the idea- just saying. He really thinks it would be good for you, though.  
This way you would end up going all over the place, sure, but it’s a job fitted to your skillset and your magical abilities. They need more skalds in the communications department to help the teams lay down phone-lines. Just think- you could be a historical figure, maybe, if you get on board with this! Like, one of the magical scouts that helped get the Known World connected again. A phone in every home and all that good stuff!

Please just think about it?

Love Tuuri (and Lalli)

 

P.S.

Just do it

L.

P.P.S

You were right. This is a good place for me. Thanks for making me go.

 

P.P.P.S

But you’re still a weird hermit

L.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who were wondering why Emil was acting OOC towards his parents (displaying that he might in fact have a mean bone in his body? For shame!) have gotten their explanation. I know there's not much canon basis for this, but I wanted to have developed family relationships in the fic, while also not conforming to the idea that everyone has the perfect family. As we can see with Onni, or should I say, Mr Hootakainen, acting as papa-bear to his cubs/sibling and cousin, there are atypical families floating around in the canon. I just kind of developed a small, saddish headcanon and went with it?
> 
> Sorry if it's a little too weird, but I'm just kind of bouncing around ideas


	7. Internship (underpaid and exploitative, of course)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, as it turns out, we were never going to spend that much time in the actual academy at all.

On the third day of lessons, Sigrun calls her four favourite students to her office.  
Well, the office which she splits with Mikkel, but Mikkel is so tidy and unobtrusive it’s basically like she has the office to herself most of the time. 

Their lessons ended several hours ago, but they are still as tired as if they have just staggered from their classrooms. Except for Reynir, but Reynir is a bottomless well of energy and has never so much as napped in the middle of class before. Unlike his compatriots, two of whom have had to be carried unconscious to their next classes, and the other of which is famous for waking herself up by falling sideways out of her chair or head-butting the desk.

They show up in a group, which is also the way they tend to travel. Emil’s new scar has settled in with the rest of his features nicely and make him look wise and experienced, rather than traumatised or disfigured. He may not have realised this yet, but Sigrun enjoys the effect immensely. Tuuri has her sweater on backwards, Lalli is wearing gloves for no clear reason, and Reynir has his hair loose from its braid.

There is a reason Reynir wears his hair in a braid. Not just because it’s convenient or looks good. His hair is some kind of independent, malicious organism when left to roam. Even as they walk into Sigrun/Mikkel’s office, Reynir is struggling to peel Tuuri out of his hair. Her hand has become ensnared in a sheaf that falls about the length of her forearm.  
She is trying to not to freak out, but the hair seems to tighten around her with every movement she makes. Meanwhile, the other two give Reynir’s waist-length curls a wide berth for fear of falling victim to its wiles as well.

Sigrun has a theory- one she has shared with Reynir’s magic teachers. His hair is magical, which is why he’s such a damned natural with his runes.  
It’s not a popular theory, in terms of scientific merit, but it has become something of a staff-room legend. Members of staff who have become victims of what is referred to as ‘Thor’s fury’ (when Reynir turns around fast and his braid slaps someone in the face or gut) are treated as war veterans. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Reynir, don’t bring that imp into my office!” Sigrun starts to collect up any papers she cannot afford to lose in Reynir’s unruly hair for the next fifteen minutes and stuffs them into a drawer.

Mikkel doesn’t react at all, because he has been sleeping on a map of the Ancient Silent World for the last twenty minutes.

“Sorry! Sorry! Ow, Tuuri, you’re pulling my hair!”

“Your hair is eating me!”

“Wait, wait, we can undo this. Hold on, just stay calm. I’ve pulled so many lambs out of thorns and brambles before and this is no different.”

“Oh, gods, it’s getting around my neck! I’m going to die!”

“Lalli, Emil. You two might as well come in here. As soon as Reynir’s hair is finished having a Tuuri steak you can let them know what’s going on. And you, Skinny, take off those gloves.”

Lalli stuffs his hands in his pockets.

“What? Is there something on your hands you don’t want me to see?”

He pushes his hands a little deeper into his pockets and edges behind Emil, who shrugs and explains: “He just likes his gloves.”

“Are they covered in blood or something?”

Lalli’s shoulders slump. He takes his hands out of his pockets and strips the glove off. Sigrun was right to suspect him; his hands are absolutely stained with gore.  
Emil reels back.

“Ew! Lalli, what the hell?”

“It’s not mine.”

“Oh- well- still! Still, where the hell did it come from?”

Sigrun claps her hands to the surface of her desk “Not important! Tuuri, if you’re choking out right now could you please do it in silence? This is really very important.”

Mikkel suddenly sits up and scans the room “What?” he asks, yawning “Are you telling them?”

“Yes. Go back to sleep Mikkel.”

He puts his head back on the desk obediently and is asleep a second later. Tuuri finally manages to free herself from the piece about her neck and begins to calm down, now that the immediate threat of death has passed.

“You kids know what an internship is?”

“Exploitative and unpaid.” says Emil.

She gives him a stern look “Valuable. For experience in the real-world fields of study you’ve all been…been studying. ‘Scuse me, kids, I’m not very eloquent this afternoon.”

“Oh, yeah,” agrees Tuuri as she pulls another tangled strand from around her wrist “A long day of drills and torture of minors will do that.”

Sigrun grins “A very long day. Any of you want to have a guess at why I’m talking about internships?”

“Is one about to become available to the school?” asks Reynir “Oh, that’s how one of my brothers got into the military, you know! He took an internship while he was studying as an administrative assistant under the Council and he was so good at punching grosslings they gave him a permanent job.”

She nods and digs out a knife, which she begins to polish with a rag and some polish kept in the top desk of her drawer beside the papers she still has to grade “You’re right, Reynir. An internship did just become available to the school. Four people are going to have the opportunity to accompany a Norwegian unit on their hunting expeditions and training programmes for a month.”

Lalli’s face turns ashen “No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes, you have all been selected.”

“No.” his voice is hoarse “I don’t want to go to Norway.”

“Tough luck, twiggy. You’re going. You and Emil and that giant hairy mess over there are all going to Norway within the week. Your guardians have all already signed off.”

He switches into Finnish to abuse his older cousin “That fat bastard! I knew he was going to do this to me! I knew he was secretly trying to kill me!”

Emil is not sure whether he should be excited or concerned “Wait, wait, wait…my aunt and uncle signed off on this? Aunt Siv? Really?”

“What’s with the interrogation, Emil? Your family wants you to succeed.”

He shakes his head “My family wants me to stay close. Aunt Siv doesn’t like me travelling on my own and Uncle Torbjörn will be pulling his hair out the whole time…I don’t know if I can do that to them?”

Sigrun nods sagely “They said you might have this reaction. Here.”  
She digs around in her pocket, extracting several weapons before she finds the letter she is searching for.

Taking the letter, Emil reads what is written incredulously. Lalli looks over his shoulder, even though he can’t read very much Swedish. Only enough to decipher street signs and hazard an educated guess at where the train station is. He just wants the satisfaction of knowing someone else is suffering at the hands of their family.

Emil reads it out loud. Either for the benefit of his audience (and for Tuuri and Reynir, now struggling out of the last stubborn twist of hair that has wrapped around Tuuri’s shoulder), or so he will believe the words “’Dear Emil, we know you probably think we don’t want you to go out into all of that mess and that bloody’…and Uncle took over.”

“How come?”

“My aunt has problems… ‘We want what is best for you and what is best for you right now is to seize every opportunity your education presents you with. Get as much experience as possible. Be the best Cleanser you can be. Also, it’s about time you saw a little bit more of the world outside Sweden. Come by the house this weekend…’ and the rest of it is just family stuff.”

Lalli is still stinging. Onni could at least have had the decency to send a letter telling him to shut up and do as he was told. Bastard cousin. 

“This is a really great opportunity, Lalli!” protests Tuuri.

Her arms are free, now, along with the rest of her. She must feel emboldened by her narrow escape from the curls of death, because she throws an arm around his shoulders and pulls him into a side-hug “I’m excited! Aren’t you excited?”

He slips into Finnish “Stoppit.”

She does too “No, this is going to be good for us. You’ll see. I promise you’ll see, Lalli. It will be nice to get a change of scenery.”

“We just did.”

“Of course,” breaks in Sigurn, who has evidently gotten sick of mutterings in a language she understands very little of “You’re not getting out of doing your work. This is actually a pretty demanding thing you’re being set up for. A serious challenge.”

Reynir groans “We still have to study? But we’re…we’re troll-hunting, right?”

“Right,” she confirms “But you, young man, are still a student. Students study. It’s their nature. Their purpose. Your teachers will be giving you work for two months in advance.”

“Two months?” three of them repeat incredulously.  
Lalli is still too mad to speak. 

“I thought the placement was only for a month!” exclaims Tuuri.  
She loathes to be away from her books for even a few days. Two months? She is not sure she can handle two months without a book to fill her hands and take her mind to the far-away places that existed before the Rash struck the world to its knees.

Ok, so Norway is the furthest she has ever been in her life and pretty damned exciting because of it, but books! She was planning to launch a marathon of Murakami novels next, and those don’t even exist outside of private collections anymore!

Mikkel takes it upon himself to clarify the issue of the length, though he does not lift his head from the book to do it. He speaks into thread between the seam of the pages “One month for the actual mission. Presuming a few days are lost due to snow-ins, a few more due to being trapped and a few more because provisions are scare or a scout has been lost. Also, one of you might get badly injured.”

“One of us already did.” says Emil under his breath.

Reynir strains to hear him and fails to guess from the volume that he was not supposed to hear him “I think your scar is cool! It makes you look sophisticated and experienced. And kind of scary. Scary is good when your job is killing scarier things, right?”

Tuuri kicks him lightly in the shins “So the two months is just a pre-emptive measure? We won’t really be out there for two months?”

Before Sigrun can reply, Mikkel says “Tell them about the tree-well.”

She grimaces “They’re already terrified.”

“Tell them about the tree-well.” he insists.

With a dramatic sigh, Sigrun reclines into her chair. She looks like an ancient queen leaning back in her throne to observe her subjects. If ancient queens scraped the dried blood and pencil shavings from underneath their nails with knives the size of their forearms.  
“Do you know what a tree-well is?”

Reynir’s hand shoots up “They’re pockets of powdery snow that form in the base of roots of huge trees! They appear to be solid, but they’re in fact very light and fluffy and basically just full of air. If you step on one, you fall in and have a few kilograms of snow dumped on you. It’s possible to die by something called immersion suffocation,” he pauses to take a breath and leans on the desk’s edge to steady himself “And a person generally survives for a few hours before succumbing to a lack of oxygen or hypothermia. I’ve fallen in those,” he does a quick calculation on his fingers “Three times. Third time a ram fell in with me as well. They’re why it’s really dangerous to go out into big woods in the snow.”

From behind them, Mikkel claps slowly underneath his desk.

Sigrun is duly impressed “Good job. I keep forgetting you used to be a shepherd.”

“Yes ma’am! You can take the shepherd out of the sheep, but you can’t take the sheep out of the shepherd!”

“Wait, wait, what is this about a tree-well?” asks Emil.

“How did you get out?” asks Tuuri at the same time, her eyes wide and awed on Reynir.

“I had my Big Sis with me the first two times and the third time I just screamed with the ram until someone came to help.” says Reynir.

“A troll fell into one, once, and the unit I was with at the time had the misfortune of walking right over it. Well, one of us did.” Sigrun looks slightly abashed, or perhaps bitter. It is difficult to read emotions from her face which do not include some variation on enthusiasm or bloodlust- say, enthused bloodlust.

She changes her mind.

“Remind me on the first night and I’ll tell you then. It’s a rite of passage to tell a scary story on your first night, so I’ll save mine for that night. And Reynir- don’t say a word about svartalfs, or I swear to the gods, I’ll do something un-teacherly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read 'unteacherly' as 'swing you around by the ankles and throw you back to Sweden'


	8. Field trip

For Emil and Reynir, who have never seen a travel-sick person before, the trip to Norway is illuminating. 

Lalli starts out reluctant to set foot on the ferry, but limits his complaints to a few mutterings to Tuuri in sullen Finnish. In her excitement, Tuuri barely registers her cousin’s discomfort. She’s going to see more of the strange, wonderful world her brother fears so much, and she has a good book to read in the lulls on the journey. In the end, accepting Sigrun’s advice to bring only one book as she would have little time for reading, Tuuri grabbed the thickest, heaviest volume available in the school’s library.

While Tuuri gets stuck into the classic epic ‘War and Peace’, Lalli sinks deeper and deeper into his seat. Reynir watches him with astonishment and a touch of homesickness; the colour Lalli’s face is turning reminds him of the lush grass his flock grazed on back in Iceland.  
Though the trip across the water is very quick and uneventful, and the route the ferry traverses is fenced in with giant, mesh fences (“There are nets underneath,” explains Emil “To keep the aquatic grosslings from attacking us”), it is plain Lalli does not feel safe.

His eyes are wide and swivelling from side to side, looking out every window within his field of vision. He clearly thinks they are about to be attacked. From any angle. From every angle. The open plane of the lake (which ends rather abruptly with chain-link fences and wooden walls around the odd coastal settlement) must look as threatening as an actual, looming troll to someone who prefers to have the cover of trees and boulders around him, the way Lalli does.  
To combat his feeling of utter vulnerability, Lalli shrinks as far back into his seat as he can and pulls his knees into his chest. The shades of green grow progressively more luminous and sickly as the kilometres slosh by.

One time, Emil cannot stop himself from asking “Is there anything I- we, we can do to make this a little easier on you?”

Lalli is thoughtful for a moment. When he speaks, it’s more of a gurgle “Kill me.”

Tuuri pats him on the top of the head “You’ll survive, kiddo. We’re already half-way there.”

A few minutes later, Sigrun swings by to check on them. She and Mikkel are travelling alongside them, but unexpectedly met up with a group of Cleansers headed for the farther reaches of Norway. Sigrun was excited to see some of her country-men (scarred, grizzled and loud appropriately for her tastes) and dragged Mikkel off with her to have a chat, to get some information on what the situation might be like troll-wise.

She gives them an appraising look. It is easy to tell from her manner that she’s been hearing what she wants to hear- unimaginable horrors lay in wait, or something like that.

“How are we-” she sees Lalli “Sweet baby Thor, boy, what’s wrong with you?”

“He gets travel-sick really badly,” explains Tuuri “In cars, boats and I think horses? There has to be a reason he hates them.”

“Horses?” manages Lalli quizzically.

“Ugly cows.”

He grunts. Gurgles, actually, but they get what it’s supposed to be.

Sigrun looks at him with a mixture of scepticism and almost sisterly concern “There anything we can do to ease your pain?”

“Kill me.”

“Ok, I’m not going to do that, but maybe you should put your head between your knees and take a nap. Look at Reynir. He’s sleeping like the dead.”

Reynir has been slumped back in his seat for the last half hour or so. He once explained that shepherds can sleep absolutely anywhere and has been proving it in the uncomfortable seats. Occasionally, the train will jolt and throw people about. Reynir bears these disturbances without much reaction. Once, he woke up long enough to ask if they were there, then fell asleep immediately after when he heard negative.

“I’ve got some stuff you guys need to hear. You’re going to hate hearing it, but hey, I hate hearing it when my parents tell me they’re waiting on a grandchild, so we all got shit we deal with. ‘Scuse the language. Emil, move that Icelander.”

He looks around “Where?”

Sigrun lifts Reynir from his spot and plunks him down across Emil’s lap. Reynir sags, his head propping up against the window. 

“Odin’s ballsack, this kid is long.” Sigrun lifts his legs, sits down, and lets them drop into her lap with a little bit of boot sticking out in the aisle “He’s getting too tall for his own good. 

Currently, Reynir is floating somewhere around six foot, four inches. There’s a joke floating around the staff-room that Reynir isn’t going to be able to fit through doorways if he has another growth spurt; he already has to fold up like a pocket mirror to fit into his desk. 

“So, I’ve been talking to those folks up front,” she nods along the train, towards the area she has apparently abandoned Mikkel “And it sounds like we’re in for a damned interesting season.”

Tuuri slips her bookmark in place and shuts the book “That doesn’t sound good.”

Sigrun’s eyes gleam “It sounds excellent, Tuuri. It’s excellent. You think you’re coming up here for some fresh air and relaxation? This is exactly what I want for you kids!”

“A wilderness teeming with demons?” suggests Emil wryly.

“Come on. You loved it last time.”

“I was disfigured last time.”

“I like your scar.” offers Tuuri “It makes you look…distinguished.”

Sigrun, on the other hand, scoffs “You want to see disfigured? You wait, Emil. Last time what you saw was just some scars from scraps. The veterans have the biggest, baddest scars. I know this one lady,” she gestures to her own chest “Whole boob, sliced right off by shrapnel-”

“Please don’t.” mumbles Lalli, suddenly looking frantic “I can’t hear this.”

He lunges across his cousin and dashes for the bathroom cubicle on the far wall, throwing the door open and slamming it shut in a blur. A few seconds later, the entire carriage is turning around as the sounds of retching echoes from the bathroom.

“Whoops,” says Sigrun “He isn’t usually grossed out this easily.”

“Lalli gets a little more sensitive when he’s sick.” says Tuuri.  
Unconsciously, she has crossed her arms across her bosom.

“Anyway, from what I heard up there? This is going to be a seriously busy summer. Don’t get too worried, Tuuri, we won’t be in the middle of it. You guys are all rookies- except for Emil, and Emil still kinda counts since he’s only killed three trolls on his own.”

Tuuri’s mouth drops open “You didn’t tell us that!”

He shrugs, uncomfortable or unwilling to talk about it “I had other things on my mind. My family-”

“Oh!” Sigrun interjects, snapping her fingers “Speaking of family! You’ll never guess who’s up there with Mikkel. In fact I bet you don’t even know she exists.”

Tuuri jumps to the first and most obvious conclusion “Mikkel has a partner?”

Her professor snorts “Yeah, his career! No, it’s his sister.”

“Mikkel has a sister?”

“Yeah, about thirty. This one is the special sister, though.”

Tuuri’s curiosity is now piqued. She leans forward across the table expectantly.  
Emil, on the other hand, is completely distracted by the continuing ruckus from the bathroom. It sounds as if Lalli’s organs are rebelling against him and trying to make an escape through his mouth.

“Are you sure he’s ok?”

Tuuri flaps her hands impatiently “He does it all the time! He gets sick just looking at horse-drawn carriages! What makes this a special sister?”

“I bet you wouldn’t peg Mikkel for a twin.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Tuuri’s jaw drops open and swings like a garden gate “A twin sister! Oh my gods, do they, like, look like each other and everything?”

“They’re not identical. You can’t have identical twins when one is a girl and the other is a boy.” says Sigrun sagely.

“I’m going to check on him.” announces Emil.

He climbs over Reynir and Sigrun carefully, and Sigrun immediately props up the sagging Icelander in Emil’s vacated seat. Emil crosses the carriage, quizzical stares following him all the way from the other passengers, and manages to knock once before the door flies open and Lalli emerges, paler, but slightly less sickly-looking than before.

“Are you alright?”

“I’d be better if you killed me when I asked.”

“I- listen, just come back and take a nap.”

Emil has to lead Lalli back, as he still quite hasn’t got his sea-legs. The Swede holds the Finn by his narrow shoulders and guides him gently. Tuuri barely shifts to the side in time before Lalli collapses face first. She turns him onto his back patiently, letting his head rest in her lap.

“You’ll be fine soon. There’s only about half an hour more, and then we’re in Norway.”

“Then we have a train journey of about,” Sigrun counts the hours off on her fingers “Maybe four or five hours, if there’s nothing huge and dead on the tracks this time.”

 

Norwegian air tastes a little different.  
Sigrun is the first to mention it. The other four have been surreptitiously covering sleeves and noses with mouths in an effort to filter out the unusual smell- and, of course, the unusual, acrid tang has combined with the lingering sea-sickness has knocked Lalli down. He crouches in ankle-deep snow, his hands clamped over his mouth in an attempt to keep an organ from finishing one of those earlier escape attempts. 

“Smell that?” she asks, stretching her arms above her head “That’s what it smells like when the national time is killing stuff.”

Reynir gags “Oh my gods! Um, am I safe to breathe this in?”

She gives him a look which is half fond and half contempt “Yes, Reynir. Unless you dive headfirst into the fires, that way,” she points towards a bloom of smoke in the far distance, over a low city-scape “You’re gonna be fine.”

The crowd from the boat is definitely an odd mix. One after the other, Cleansers and other military personnel depart with weapons slung over their shoulders and tanks of fuel for flame-throwers bouncing against their legs. Right behind them are fathers with drowsy children on their hips and mothers with huge pregnancies under their coats, trailing older children, whining about the cold or the ashy quality of the snow.

Civilians and their protectors alike. 

And then there they are; four of them in the uniforms of the Mora Academy, the other performing some kind of weird callisthenic sun-salutation to shake off the aches from sitting still for so long.

“Alrighty, we got about an hour before we need to be boarding the train. If Mikkel can get his butt over here in the next ten minutes, we’ll be fine. Lalli, you still want to die?”

“A little less.”

She pats him gently on the crown “Attaboy.”

“Oh there’s – wait, wait, who is that?” Tuuri points towards a tall woman coming down the gangplank.

Emil lets out a theatrical gasp “I know her! Oh, so that’s- oh! Now…now I get it.”

Reynir has totally missed out on what’s going on. He smiles in confusion and glances around for the explanation.  
When he sees the woman Tuuri is still pointing at, and the man who ducks out of the boat behind her, his eyes widen to the size of dinner plates. 

Mikkel walks behind a woman who is essentially his copy.   
If Mikkel were ever to undergo some kind of strange transformation whereby he turned into a woman overnight, he would look like this; the same features, softened, and the same thick, blonde hair (minus the majestic sideburns) and the shoulders shaped like a farmer’s plough, with the addition of an impressive bosom. She even walks with that same confident, weird kind of stride-glide, like she trusts everything to shuffle politely out of her way and her feet are not really planted on the treacherous snow.

“Twins,” breathes Reynir. This is apparently the most amazing thing he has ever seen “Wow. They really look alike.”

Sigrun waves “Hey, Maddsens! Over here!”

Their heads turn in perfect sync. 

The woman says something indistinguishable to Mikkel, who nods, and takes the rifle from her shoulder. He slings her rifle over his shoulder and passes over the bag he was carrying. She digs around in his bag as they walk over. By the time they have reached them, Mikkel’s twin sister has dug out a shapeless grey sweater, which she pulls on over the blue sweater she already wears.

“He stole that from me a year ago,” says Mikkel’s sister from the woolly confines of her sweater “Brothers, right? And where the hell is the head-hole? Mikkel, help me.”

He pulls the sweater at the waist until his sister’s head pops out, all blonde and rumpled.

“This is my twin,” says Mikkel flatly “Mikkela.”

A beat of silence.

“Our parents weren’t very creative.” says Mikkela.

Tuuri and Emil exchange a glance, then turn away, snorting behind their hands.

Mikkela scans the group and steps up to Reynir. He stiffens nervously. She looks him up, down and then sideways, to get a better angle on his braid.  
“You’re an Árnason, aren’t you?”

“Uh.” says Reynir.

Mikkela nods thoughtfully “I know your sister, Honey Badger. That’s what we call her anyway. She’s about as vicious as one in battle. She’s always bragging about her little brother in the Mora Academy. She says your hair is a wonder of the Known World.” a pause, for a scrutinising look at his braid “Badger was right.”

She then catches sight of Emil and snaps her fingers- as best one can through thick gloves.

“I know you!” they say at the same time.

“Come again?” asks Mikkel.

Mikkela takes her rifle back from him “I know this kid! I saw him around when I was posted up in Sweden.”

“You were a milkmaid or something?”

“I- what? No, I was a skald for the Council!”

“Then how come you were always carrying milk?”

“I was helping that ancient woman, your neighbour, with her chores. She was hosting me while I did my work out there. It was the least I could do.”

Emil glances between the twins. Suddenly, he looks very relieved “I thought I was going crazy. I knew I knew Mikkel from the first day, but he was a woman the last time I saw him.”

Mikkel squints at him “You thought I was a Swedish milkmaid?”

He nods sheepishly “From about the first day?”

Mikkela lets out a bark of laughter, which sounds very much what Mikkel’s might sound like if he ever laughed “See, little man? I wreck your life even when I’m not there!”

His expression grows stormy- not angry, but rather, resigned. He glances wistfully back at the water, perhaps judging how far he would have to throw his sister to get her into the ocean. 

“Don’t we have a train to catch?” he says.

 

(Dalsnes)

They arrive in Dalsnes by the cover of night.

The long day of travel has wiped out the kids- save Tuuri, who is too invested in her book to even think about shutting her eyes for longer than it takes to blink. She is the first to realise the lights of Dalsnes are drifting into view on the horizon. Yawning, Tuuri reaches over the table to rouse her cousin and Emil, who are leaning on each other, dead asleep. Reynir has to be slapped awake again, though he does not begrudge her for it.

They stagger off the train. This time, the crowd is much thinner, and compromised mainly of the military, mixed in with the odd skald like Mikkela. 

“They are darlings,” whispers Mikkela to her twin, as they follow a sleepy Lalli down the platform “How old are they?”

“Fifteen and sixteen.”

“The little Finnish one reminds me of our own skinny twig. How were the girls doing, by the way?”

“Fine, I’m sure. They didn’t think it worth their time to take a break from the camping trip to see me.”

“You are pretty boring. What about Mama?’”

“She has her eyes on the farmhand again. From down the road, not ours.”

Mikkela laughs “There’s some estrogen left in that woman yet! I cannot believe her, honestly. Dad would be turning in his grave. Oh, that remind me. Did you-”

“Yes.”

“What kind of piece?”

“Half a rib.”

“Last time I was up there, I wiped out on one of his vertebrae. Dad was a crazy bastard, wasn’t he? Shedding pieces of his bones all over the family farm. Honestly!”

“You didn’t tell me you were coming to Dalsnes.”

She shrugs “I didn’t think I was. I certainly didn’t think we’d end up here at the same time. Still, it will be nice, won’t it? I can’t remember the last time we worked on something together.”

“The reclamation.”

They walk on in silence after that.

 

The first thing they hear coming from the military compound where they will be spending the next month (or, according to Mikkel, two months if one of them is grievously injured) is a lot more encouraging than they expect.

The walk over is a lethargic, sickly affair. Lalli seems to be travel-sick from just moving his feet. The Madsen twins are utterly silent and freaking everyone out by walking in step, though they do not seem to realise they are matching each other’s pace perfectly. Emil and Reynir have both grown tired very suddenly and have to make a supreme effort to stay on their feet, under the weight of their luggage.

Because she is listening for it, Sigrun is the first to hear it “Oh, great. They’re singing again. Don’t count on a good night’s sleep, kids.”

Strains of music in a strange language drift over the snowy plain which still separates them from the compound. Tuuri strains forwards, trying to make sense of the words.

“What’s that? I’ve never heard that language before.”

“English. Norwegian version of it, anyway. Apparently, back in the day most of the country spoke the language as well as Norwegian. We kind of still know it, but not really, you know? Just in our songs.”

Mikkel speaks up unexpectedly, making Lalli jump “That song…what a classic.”

Sigrun turns and squints at him “Behave yourself, you.”

“Are you sure that’s a song?” asks Emil, whose experience of classical songs was carefully limited to the true masterpieces, like Bach and Sigúr Ros.

“Sounds like a slaughter.” agrees Lalli, who has only ever heard the odd fisherman’s shanty, like ‘Haul away Joe’ or ‘What the water gave me’.

“What is it called?” asks Reynir, whose father was a massive fan of classical music and therefore subjected him to his old-man bands on repeat in the ancient family stereo- he has never heard this song, though, which means it probably wasn’t written by Nirvana or Taylor Swift.

“’Bohemian Rhapsody’.” says Mikkel. He feel it is his responsibility, as the only one with more than a passing knowledge of the Ancient World- he might have more confidence in his four students if they ever studied for their pop-quizzes or turned in essays on time.

Mikkela pipes up with “Wasn’t that written by the Queen of England?”

“So the legend goes. Which you would know if you hadn’t slept through Ancient History.”

“Get stuffed, fat man.” she says playfully and elbows him in the stomach “I paid attention. Enough attention to get a better job than you, anyway.”

He elbows her back, slightly less playfully than she elbowed him.  
Tuuri watches with interest, getting the sense that it is only the company and social conventions which are keeping these thirty-pluses from letting the exchange devolve into a slap-fight. 

Sigrun decides to take them through the back-entrance. Given how rowdy the dinner sounds, she doesn’t want to trail four extremely sleepy children through the hall and subject them to the tipsy scrutiny of her colleagues. Emil, especially (as she makes a point of telling him) is going to get a lot of people coming up to him to look at his scar and ask how he’s doing, and probably slap him on the back in greeting, so hard he falls into the snow, in the typical fashion of a Norwegian soldier.

As the song rises to a fever-pitch, they enter the grounds. The very first thing Reynir does is slip on a patch of ice and go ass-over-tea-kettle into a snow-drift. While Emil and Lalli pick him out of the Reynir-shaped hole in the powder, Mikkela says her goodbyes. She is expected in the hall to meet the Generals, and has to part ways for now. She gives her brother a punch in the shoulder and tells him to be good, then stride-glides off over the ice and snow.

Mikkel seems to consider tossing a snowball at her back, but he resists the urge and dusts Reynir off instead.

Sigrun leads them confidently around the complex, taking care to steer clear of the hall. They see no one else. There are no lights on, save for in the sentry’s tower in the distance. Row after row of silent barracks. 

Finally, the stop at a barrack detached from the rest.

“Here we are.”

Sigrun does not try to open the door. Instead, she hands her bag to Emil, lowers her shoulder, and charges the door running. The door crashes inwards on shrieking hinges. Sigrun catches herself on the doorframe and sighs sleepily.

“This,” she says around a yawn “Is the stickiest door on the complex. You kinda gotta, you know, bam it open. If it gets really stuck, try whacking it with a hammer.” 

She points to a small chink that has been taken out of the door.

“Once had to take an axe to it. Poor Ylva got stuck in here when she needed to pee. That was a real emergency, because women can’t hold it for as long as men can.”

Lalli has grown tired of waiting. He squeezes past her and gropes around the dark room for a few moments, then there is the sound of a body flopping onto something soft. Sigrun flicks on a set of blinking halogen lights.

“Lalli, that’s a tent you’re sleeping on top of. We use this room for storage, by the way. There’s a lot of weird things in here, but don’t let it put you off sleeping. Lalli, get off that. A man died in that thing.”

He kicks off his boots and plants his face in the torn fabric so he doesn’t have to respond.


	9. Learning the ropes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shippers glasses on, EmiLalli folks. Shipper glasses on

Being the classically educated, slightly spoiled child he is, when Emil wakes up with a heavy weight on his ribs and a pair of luminous eyes in his face, his first thought is: buzzard.

Or was it a vulture?  
Whichever bird it was that tore Prometheus’s liver out on a daily basis (perhaps even an eagle?) Emil is 99% sure that bird is hunched on his chest, getting ready to part his liver from his body’s company. It is the other rational 1% that keeps him from freaking out and yelling “I’M NOT PROMETHEUS!!”, because this part recognises the eyes as that of a cat.

The rest of him catches up; it’s a cat on his chest, not a buzzard or an eagle or a vulture. A medium-sized cat with reddish-white fur, long whiskers and short, torn ears. It sits on his chest, about as dainty as a dumbbell, and licks its front-paw with the air of a classy woman touching up her make-up, or a seasoned warrior adjusting her eyepatch so as to cover her scar better.  
Emil is very confused that this cat is not Egil or Einar.

Most of his encounters with cats in the last year or so have either involved fending off over-affectionate blubber-balls trying to climb into his pyjama pants for warmth at night. Or trying to climb into his pyjama pants to bite at the tantalisingly soft things that their other, more evil cat seems to have a passion for biting at when it comes to the boys.

To have a cat sit on him like it’s the most natural and comfortable thing in the world is as strange as it is disconcerting.

“Hello,” he says curiously in Swedish “You’re an early riser, huh?”

The cat continues to lick its paw. Emil decides it is a she because the shape of the chubby, mouse-fattened body reminds him a little bit of Tuuri. The flicker of her ears is the only sign that she heard him.

“Got a name? I bet it’s a noble one. Freja? I bet you’re a Freja. Or maybe a Tyr. The fierce Tyr, with all two of her front-paws.”

“Shaddap.” mumbles Tuuri from her bunk “Try’na ta sleep over here.”

“There’s a kitty on my chest.”

“Good for you.”

He is, frankly, surprised Tuuri has the audacity to complain about how much sleep she’s being allowed to get. When they shuffled into the room in the late hours of the night, it was all Emil and Reynir could do to peel Lalli of the dead man’s tent and toss him onto one of the four bunks- this time arranged in two rows opposite each other, so it felt weird for them not to be sleeping in corners.

While her companions shrugged off snow-dampened sweaters and struggled into some misshapen, knitted things Aunt Siv had sent along with them to sleep in (fearing the Norwegian weather would freeze her nephew and his unit, she had knitted them each what was either a sweater or an under-sized body bag with sleeves and a neck-hole), Tuuri opened her book and settled on her bed for a night of hard-reading.   
She was still up and going steady when Emil dropped off. Granted, that was only about fifteen minutes after his head hit the pillow, but going by the way her voice sounds, she must have been up for the better part of the night.

“That’s Kitty.”

Emil looks around for the source of the voice. Finally, he sees Lalli’s grey head behind a pile of boxes which are apparently full of explosives left behind by an old geological survey or something. He seems to be crouched down. Emil cranes his neck and sees Lalli is picking something thorny out of the laces of those weird long boots he wears.

“What?” he yawns.

“Kitty,” repeats Lalli “That’s Kitty.”

“Who’s Kitty?”

“One of the cats.”

Tuuri grumbles and throws a pillow into the room. She isn’t aiming for anything, and doesn’t hit anything either.

“You mean one of the feline unit?”

He nods.

“What’s she doing in here?”

“Followed me, I guess.”  
He straightens up and reveals himself to be wearing what Tuuri refers to as his ‘magic hood’- the hooded, robe-like jacket he wears as a part of his mage uniform. The shoulders are dusted with the powder-snow that falls in the mornings and his wet boots squeak slightly on the floor as he crosses the room. At his approach, the cat’s ears perk. She turns and looks at him through squinted eyes.

Lalli mimics her expression almost perfectly. 

Emil feels he might have just landed himself in the middle of a turf war, until Lalli reaches around the cat and takes hold of her gently, depositing her on the ground. He then perches on the edge of Emil’s bed and yawns.

“So you met a cat?”

“The Generals too. Sigrun’s parents.”

“Mr and Mrs General?”

“Uh-huh.”

Emil cannot help but shiver “Oh, I bet they loved you.”

“They didn’t hate me.”

“No, not like that, Lalli. Like…they like unusual people, I think? They like Mikkel a lot and he’s weird. I meant they should be able to get along well with you. These soldiers, if they’re the same people I was working with, they’re going to get along fine with us. They haven’t got much respect or patience for ordinary people, you know?”

“Ordinary people have worries too.”

From the slightly glazed expression in his eyes, Emil guesses he is thinking of his eldest cousin. Emil resists the temptation to list some of the hundreds of ways in which his eldest cousin is by no means an ordinary person.  
Instead, he swings his legs over the side of the bed. And loses the motivation to move as swiftly as it came to him. He puts his shoulder to Lalli’s.

“Gods…how long have you been up?”

Lalli shrugs “An hour. Not long.”

“What time is it?”

“Six.”

Emil groans “Thank the gods. I don’t have to move for another hour.”

If his memory serves, the day doesn’t start officially until seven. Anyone who wants to train or whatever before the units meet in the hall for breakfast and briefings does so under their own steam. Really, he only has forty-five more minutes to sleep. But that’s enough for him.

“I’m going back to sleep.” he announces, his head hitting the pillow heavily.

Lalli kicks off his boots and pulls off the hood, flinging it over half of the frame of a burnt-out machine gun that Reynir is using as a nightstand “Sounds good.”

Sliding under the covers, Lalli lays down next to him. He has the courtesy to keep his cold hands to himself, and doesn’t steal much of the pillow when he settles with his face to Emil’s shoulder-blades. He prefers to be on the outside when he shares a bed- that way, if anything reaches around from underneath the bed in search of prey, he will be the first to know about it and won’t end up waking up with nothing but huge bloodstain beside him.

Emil has no idea where this logic or scenario has come from, but he has never complained. 

 

“This, kids, is what a troll looks like when we’re finished with it.”

The woman addressing them is called Gull. She introduced herself during the orderly chaos of breakfast and, after the mandatory amount of gaping at Reynir’s hair and trying to coax Lalli into shaking her hand (which was missing more fingers than it had), she lead them a little away from the hall to talk properly.

Gull explained she was going to be the one who handled them most of the time. Handled was the word she chose. Handled, like she was going to be using a cattle prod rather than kind words.  
When Reynir asked where Sigrun and Mikkel were going to be, Gull grew very serious.

“Now, I don’t know how Captain Eide is thought of at your school. Around here she’s…she’s a living legend. I mean it. She’s the most amazing-”

Emil broke in. He already heard this once before “We know she’s amazing. We spend a lot of time with her. She shows off her prowess and insanity at school all the time.”

“It’s not insanity. It is…it’s inspired. You are truly lucky people for having this woman to guide you. Captain Eide is a real authority figure around here. You should treat her as such from now on, and don’t call her by her first name. Forget you’re her students for now. Be her soldiers instead. I promise you all, you’ll be the better for it.”

At that point, Lalli was for some reason struck by the urge to share “She once made me duel her with a mop. She said I would need to know what to do if I ever faced a troll with a lightsabre.”

Gull walked away in silence and did not reappear until everyone was finished eating and splitting off for their missions and training.

When she retrieved them, she hustled them through the hall and grounds. Presumably so none of the soldiers could stop them to shake the newbies down and say hello again to Emil. This last one especially, because, as Sigrun explained on the walk over, the Norwegian way of welcoming a comrade back involves grabbing said comrade by the collar and stuffing their pants full of snow while saying unpleasant things about their parents- all in good humour of course. 

Emil thinks as far ahead as to make Lalli swap coats with him so he has a hood to pull over his hair, which would essentially be a golden beacon. No one else on the base has hair like that. Everyone is either the fiery red Sigrun sports, the grey of the Hotakainens or that generic brunette that looks a little bit like fertile soil.

“Are you sure that’s a troll?” asks Reynir uncertainly.

She gives him a withering glare “I think I know how to do my job.”

Reynir seems completely unaware of the challenge on her honour he has just issued- or, innocent of the implications, at least “It doesn’t…I don’t know? I mean, it doesn’t look real, does it?”

“That’s a troll.” confirms Emil “Oh, this is the first one you’ve ever seen, isn’t it?”

Nodding, Reynir takes a cautious step back “Uh, it just looks like a big dead piece of livestock. With…with a human skeleton buried in it.”

Gull softens a little “First time seeing a troll? Huh. You’re going to get over those first time jitters pretty soon- hey, skinny, keep the thigh-highs outta the ribcage.”

Lalli ignores her and continues toeing through the ashy wreck of the chest cavity. Tuuri reaches to stop him, then stops, and steps back and tightens the straps of her breathing mask. This is not her first time seeing a troll- dead or otherwise- but this the closest she has ever gotten to one. Her cousin, on the other hand, has apparently killed some with his bare hands.  
No one in the team had difficulty believing this when Tuuri told them.

“There’s something in its chest.” he says.

“That’s called a ‘rib’,” Gull tugs at his arm impatiently “Now stop it, you might infect your sister.”

“She’s not my sister.” he tugs his arm away and stoops, burying both hands up to the wrists in the cavity.

Reynir turns sharply, rips off his mask, and vomits a respectful distance away.

“What is this?”

Lalli hefts something out of the ash. He brushes a fragment of white bone from his forearm and hands his trophy over to Gull, whose eyes swell to the size of dinner plates the moment they land on the strange object he dug out.

“How did you know this was in here?” she breathes in wonder.  
Gull holds the folds of a blackened, ragged robe. The pattern is buried in a cake of ash and dried blood, but it is easy to tell just from the shape that it is a heavy-duty winter garment of some description.

“What is it?” he repeats impatiently.

“We had a mage here, a while back. They disappeared one day. This…this is their hood. I don’t know why it isn’t burned.”

“We make our clothes fire-proof. All of us. Em, give me a match.”

Emil obliges. The tip of the match flares without Lalli striking it. He casually tosses the match at Emil. Rather than swatting it away, Emil watches in bewilderment as the match lands on his shoulder. The flame quickly spreads over the cloak, but Emil gives no sign of being in pain aside from a small, sharp yelp of surprise.

“Lalli!”

“What?”

“A little warning, next time!”

He shrugs “You’re fine.”

“How the hell do I douse this?”

“Just pat it off.”

Emil starts slapping the fire out. Gull watches in a stunned silence- Tuuri and Reynir, however, are not impressed or surprised. Lalli does stuff like this all the time. Mostly to Emil, for some reason.

“See? Flame-proof. That’s why it’s not burned.”  
He takes the robe from Gull’s hand and snaps some of the ash off.

With the majority of the ash gone, it becomes easier to see the pattern; a pattern that Reynir might wear as a trim of one of his travelling cloaks.  
“Oh. They were Icelandic.” says Reynir. He adjusts his breathing mask “I…I don’t see any spirits though, do you, Lalli?”

Lalli points behind him silently, causing them all to whirl around. A figure approaches from the distant compound. 

“Oh my Gods! Lalli!” Tuuri slaps his arm “You can’t do that to people! We thought you were pointing out a ghost!”

The ‘ghost’ looks more like a lit candle got up and started jogging- it’s Sigrun, with the sun glancing off her red hair.

She waves “Morning! How are we today, kids?”

Gull lets out a strangled gasp of either terror or awe, or both.

“Good.”

“Fine.”

“Careful where you step. I may have, um, kind of-”

“Puked? Don’t worry kid, everyone does it. You shoulda seen Emil after his first kill. It was like a- Lalli, what the hell is that? What is it with you and picking up weird dead things?”

She takes the robe from him and squints at the patterns.

“Oh, this is that Icelandic mage that went missing, isn’t it?”

Gesturing to the burnt-out troll, Lalli says “It was in there. In the rib-cage.”

Gull jumps in, eager to make her competence known as well “I thought it was strange that the robe hadn’t burned-”

Sigrun scoffs “Mage robes never burn! Speaking of which, Emil, were you just on fire?”

Emil shrugs his smoking shoulders.

“How many times, Lalli, am I going to have to tell you to stop lighting your battle buddy on fire?”

Lalli thinks over this for a moment “Until I run out of matches.”

Chuckling, Sigrun ruffles his hair fondly “That’s my twig. Anyway, I came to tell you there’s been a change of plans. There’s been a giant sighting not too far from here. You kids are gonna be spectating. What better way to learn the ropes than, you know, to watch people scrambling all over them and falling off and dying?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little while back, a certain artist with an adorably fluffy style drew the pictures which Emil was described in a previous chapter. I kept forgetting to include the links because I am dumb, but here they are, at last
> 
> http://i.imgur.com/UHKcdUx.png
> 
> http://i.imgur.com/wRMwJX6.png


	10. Demonstration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of gore here. Very much gore, as well as some magey stuff.   
> There is also some experimentation with formatting in the very last part- it's dialogue only. You'll have to forgive me for that part. It was 3 a.m. when I started writing that and the early-morning me is a little bit avant garde and risk-taking. I was not pleased when I woke up the next day, fully returned to my senses, but I decided to post it anyway.
> 
> Also, Reynir finally explains his experience with svartalfs

They call them giants for a reason.

A good reason- not because there was some nicknaming involved or someone decided it would be poetic to name the monsters after Old World myths and legends.  
Because the giants are literally walking mounds of ravenous flesh, with spines of bone bristling out of every fold of foul, putrefying flesh. They make noises like a locomotive falling off the track, combined with the shriek of a flock of angry seagulls.  
To call them anything but ‘giants’ would be selling them short.

Sigrun has them watch from behind the fence. One of the reasons this giant needs to be dealt with so urgently is its proximity to the boundary of the compound. If it got it in its head (heads) to stroll over to the compound, it would be there in three minutes. Too close to wait for it to slink back into the woods.   
From behind the fence (where several other soldiers are gawking with them), they have an excellent view of the chaos unfolding.

First, it is just Sigrun and her minions (the actual term Sigrun’s soldiers responded to) standing in a tight formation in front of the woods, their weapons drawn. One of them let off a jet of flame from a flamethrower every now and then, and they could be heard laughing and joking with each other.

Then, the sentry shouted down from their tower “Get ready!”

Silence fell immediately.  
In the tension of the moment, Reynir finds himself grabbing Tuuri’s hand. He lets go when she gives him a strange look, and move his hand to the crook of her elbow instead.

The tree-line shivers.  
A gaunt shape breaks through the snowy foliage. Even from hundreds of metres away, they can all clearly see the eyes. As wide as the socket. Fragments of flesh hanging off in a mimicry of tears. For a moment, it is just the one face, wreathed in all that green.

Reynir grabs Tuuri’s arm with both hands. Lalli lets out a faint rumble of disgust and looks sidelong at Emil.

“Was it this big?”

“What? My first one?”

Lalli taps the new scar “That one.”

Emil shakes his head “It was bigger.”

Up ahead, Sigrun lets out a piercing whistle. The same whistle she uses to summon her students from the track and obstacle courses.   
The troll’s head swivels towards her. Sigrun takes the rifle from her shoulder and casually shoots an eye out. The shock of the shot barely makes the troll flinch. A gout of blood puffs out of one eye. A length of sinew unfurls sullenly down the cheek.

Reynir turns, lifts his mask, and does some deep-breathing exercises while Tuuri pats him on the back.  
“Breathe, Reynir, just breathe.”

Sigrun can be clearly heard from across the field. Her voice carries as easily as if she were back in the lecture halls, crashing one of Mikkel’s classes to regale students with stories of how Ancient World knowledge can actually be helpful in real-life situations.

“It’s mad now, soldiers. Get ready.”  
She fires another shot into a ruined cheek for good measure.

The troll steps out into full view.

“Ew.” says Lalli.

“Yep.” says Emil “That was my first reaction.”

“You threw up, didn’t you.”

“That too.” Emil turns to him with a sheepish smile “I should know better than to try to play it cool with you, shouldn’t I?”

The corner of Lalli’s mouth quirks up just a little bit “You’re still learning.”

“Fire!” barks Sigrun “No, not that kind! Gods, Ylva, we talked about this!”

A jet of flame catches what might be the troll’s shoulder and sends it bulging, stumbling onto what are probably knees and grinding itself in the snow to douse the flame. Snow flies everywhere. The ground shakes. One of the soldiers is knocked head-over-heels and lets out an indignant cry.  
Sigrun steps back in time to avoid most of the chaos. She levels her rifle and fires again and again into the beast.

Even over the sound of the troll thrashing in the snow, Sigrun can still be heard letting out a steady stream of abuse.  
The language Sigrun is using is the kind which would get her fired if the guardians of her students could hear her. It is foul. It is incredible. It is unprecedented, and Emil seems more horrified by the filth coming out of his mentor’s mouth than by the multi-headed chimera of a monster turning over and over in the snow.

“This is insane.” remarks Tuuri, still rubbing Reynir’s back “Emil, you dealt with this?”

“Mine was a lot more tame.”

“How did you not die horribly when it knocked you over?”

Emil shrugs “Luck, I suppose.”

“Onni’s name means luck.” says Lalli randomly “Kind of.”

His cousin gives him a strange look.

“What?”

“You are so weird.”

“YLVA WILL YOU STOP WITH THE FLAME-THROWER! IT DIDN’T WORK THE FIRST TIME! IT WON’T WORK THE SECOND TIME! YOU ARE LITERALLY TOASTING ME, SOLDIER!”

In spite of her fears that she might be, Sigrun escapes the flame blast without so much as a singe-mark on her uniform. The troll, on the other hand, stumbles away from the enthusiastic Cleanser making the noise that grease makes when it is left at the bottom of a hot pan.   
The smell rolls over them a few seconds later. It is so superbly disgusting it knocks the legs right out from under a few of the assembled soldiers. Rather than trying to stand his ground, Reynir just lowers himself to his knees and clasps both hands over his mask.

“This is so gross,” he chants again and again, like a prayer or a spell “This is so gross, this is so gross…”

Lalli pulls his collar over his mouth and nose, muttering something in Finnish.

“Pretty gross, isn’t it?” says Emil into his own elbow “I almost passed out the first time I smelled a burning troll.”

“Sigrun’s sense of smell must be completely gone.” muses Tuuri “Because we can barely breathe over here, and look at her.”

Sigrun is weaving all over the place, dodging the troll’s various attempts to squish her with a smoky limb. She is obviously not at all affected by the smell of the burning troll at all. She fires shot after shot into its legs; the strategy is to shoot whatever serves as legs out from under the quarry, then leap onto the body and squish all of the viable, active heads.  
Sigrun has all kinds of horror stories of putting her boot through ribcages, or having a head parrot a few words of Danish or Norwegian at her- sometimes, even the languages of the long-lost worlds, like Farsi and Mandarin and German, which only a few people currently living know how to speak.

It doesn’t take her very long to bring the troll down.  
Once it is felled, Sigrun hops up with expert ease. She raises a hand when her colleagues try to come after her, stopping them in their tracks.

“No need! I got it! Re-form the line. I can hear another one of those bastards coming outta the woods.”

No sooner than Sigrun has put her knife through the skull of the final head does another troll come lumbering out of the woods.  
This one prompts a gasp.

Reynir gives up entirely at this point and curls into foetal position, grasping Tuuri’s ankle either to arm himself or for comfort.

“By the dark bowels of Tuonela,” breathes Tuuri “That is something I have never seen before.”

The troll is truly something weird. 

The kind of weird that might have had even Thor and Väinämöinen heading for the hills. The heads are centred in a cluster on the top of a very top-heavy body, gathered around a central point like the petals of a flower. From this central point stretches a column of bone- probably a vertebrae, going by the segmented shape- which whips this way and that, like a snake’s tongue scenting the air.   
Supporting this entire precarious structure are spindly legs, each one no thicker or bigger than Lalli’s famously dainty wrists. There are so many legs protruding from the bottom of the bloom of gurgling heads, they appear to be a fuzz rather than individual appendages.

The troll stands in front of the tree-line for a moment, sizing up its opponents. On top of the body, her boot still firmly planted in the cranium of her last victim, Sigrun levels her rifle again.

“Fall back!” she orders “We’re gonna have to shoot this one down. Ylva, no fire. The last thing we need is this motherfucker charging for the fence.”

They all begin to fire at the same time. Heads start to pop, reminding Emil very weirdly of berries being crushed between fingers. Unwilling or unable to watch, Tuuri seizes his arm and plants her face in his shoulder. He pats her absently on the head and mutters some hollow comfort.

Meanwhile, Lalli leans against the fence. His eyes are so wide it’s beginning to look like he has forgotten how to blink. 

“I’ve seen something like this before.” he says.

“When?”

“With Onni. He made me use the First Rule. First time too.”

“Did he fight it?”

In his shoulder, Tuuri scoffs “Onni doesn’t fight very much. He prefers skulking and glaring.”

Lalli shoots his cousin an irritated stare, to Emil’s surprise “He fights. You just don’t see it because you can’t come out with us.”

Emil senses he’s about to be caught in the middle of a revival of a very old argument. He clears his throat “So, you saw it up close or from far away?”

“Far away.”

“I’ve never seen one this close before.” peeps Reynir from the floor “And I really hate it.”

The troll is getting closer. Each step is hard –won, though; it must have taken about fifteen shots to its multiple faces by now, and it is easy to tell Sigrun is getting sick of the work. She has got to find a way to stop it from pushing them all the way back up against the fence, where the troll might conceivably be able to droop over the fence and kind of flop over.

Emil has seen it before. When he whispers this to Lalli, trying to keep Tuuri from hearing, Lalli turns to him with glowing eyes. His eyes are not on fire the way Emil has seen him when casting a serious spell, or catching Tuuri in the process of eating something he was saving for later, but the heat has definitely entered his stare.

“It’s not going to get that close.”

Before Emil can scrape up the courage to ask Lalli what the Hel he means, one of the troll’s head pops. Inexplicably, because there had been no gunshot before it, and all of the soldiers seem to be reloading their rifles.

Sigrun confirms this; her head snaps up and she shouts “Who the hell fired that?”

“Lalli!” hisses Reynir “Don’t! You know we’re not supposed to do that.”

“So don’t tell.”

All at once, the rest of the heads pop. The noise is fantastic. Like a crack of thunder.  
And a second later, little fragments of brain matter and jelly start to rain down from all around.

The soldiers laugh in amazement and relief. Tuuri shrieks and sticks her head underneath Emil’s coat in an effort to avoid being splashed. Reynir gives Lalli possibly the first angry look which has ever existed on his face, and reaches up to flick him in the flank.  
Lalli pays no attention to him.

Sigrun turns and locks eyes with him. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes are dark.

“Alright, team, that’s it! Disperse!”

“Wait, wait,” protests the woman with the flame-thrower “What was that?”

“That was a little helping hand from the gods or something, don’t worry about it. Clear off, people. Leave the flame-thrower with me. I’ll burn this thing to ashes. The rest of you, get your butts back to your posts.”

They disperse like dead leaves in a strong wind; evidently, an order from a blood-spattered Sigrun Eide is not an order to be taken lightly. While her soldiers stumble, limp and skip back into the compound via a heavily padlocked door, Sigrun bends over the ruin of the troll’s corpse. Once, she brings her boot down on the troll, producing the now familiar, sickening crunch of bone.

“Kids! Come out here!”

Reynir blanches “Uh, really?”

“Reynir, you’re perfectly safe. I promise.”

“How do you know there aren’t-”

“Intuition! March, mister!”

Standing shakily, Reynir hooks his fingers into the mesh of the fence and hobbles along to the gate. His legs don’t seem to be cooperating. In fact, they are shaking so badly, the tremors are actually visible. His knees literally knock together a few times. Reynir takes a few deep breaths in an effort to bring himself under control, but it doesn’t seem to work.  
Finally, Tuuri takes pity on him and scoops him up- an easy feat for her, thanks to Sigrun’s Defensive Arts training, even though Reynir is quite literally a foot taller than her. 

“Thanks,” he groans, looping an arm around her shoulders “I think I’m…what are those things called? The things where your lungs are trying to crawl out of your mouth?”

“An asthma attack?”

“No, the other one.”

“A heart attack?”

“The one with the panic.”

“A panic attack?”

He coughs “Haven’t had one of these in forever.”

“Are you gonna be ok?”

“Sure. Fine. Spectacular. I’m gonna be great. Oh, gods, gods, there’s the body, no, I’m not getting any closer. Put me down right now.”

Tuuri obliges and Reynir quickly prostrates himself in the snow, turning on his back, and pulling the collar of his jacket up over his eyes.  
“I’ll be fine!” he assures her in a shaking voice “I’m just gonna count sheep until it stops.”

Leaving Reynir to sort through his panic problems by himself, the other three gather around. Sigrun straightens up and strips off her outermost-jacket. She flings the jacket into the snow, her nose wrinkled in disgust.  
She rounds on Lalli.

“You, Junior, are in big trouble.”

He hunches his shoulders “I killed it, didn’t I?”

Sigrun scowls “Yes you did. Brilliant job, inspired job, but also unauthorised. And really fucking dangerous. You know you’re not supposed to exert yourself like that this early in your training, let alone even touch a giant with your luonto.”

Emil looks at Tuuri; he has little to no idea what they are talking about. Tuuri, on the other hand, is grim and serious. She is apparently on the same page as the rest of them, so Emil decides he had better pretend to be as well. He gets that Lalli did something extremely dangerous. That, at least, he can be indignant about.

Sigrun continues “You know what that could do to you, Lalli. You’re still so young, inexperienced. Touching a part of your damned soul to these things,” she kicks the corpse with the toe of her boot “Is like if Reynir stuck his head inside this bastard’s ribcage and licked everything.”

“EW.” announces Reynir.

“You could get infected with the- the whatever it is. What the Hel do they call it? The spiritual pathogen part? Whatever. That thing. You can be as immune as possible to the physical disease, but have you ever seen what it looks like when the disease gets inside your mind? It’s not pretty.”

“I know what it looks like,” he interrupts “That’s how our grandmother died.”

Sigrun puts her hands on her hips “Then you should know better. Come here.”

Lalli approaches reluctantly. Emil opens his mouth to defend him, then shuts it when Tuuri kicks him in the shins.

“Closer.” orders Sigrun.

Lalli shuffles closer.

She takes him by the chin and tilts his head up, pulling up an eyelid to examine his sclera “Well, the good news is you got away scot-free this time. If you were sick, you would have had a massive internal haemorrhage by now.”

“A what?” asks Emil.

“It’s when your brain liquefies and comes out of your ears.” clarifies Lalli.

“Ah. That’s, that’s really gross.”

“Lalli, come right here.” Sigrun points to a patch of snow.

Reluctantly, Lalli obeys. He seems to attempt to shrink into himself and draw himself up to his full height (a few inches under 6 foot) at the same time.  
Sigrun narrows her eyes.

Then, she lunges so quickly she is just a red blur for a moment. Lalli’s head goes under one arm, the other hand makes a fist, and she starts grinding a knuckle into his crown.

“Punishment!” she barks “Bad mage! No over-exertion! Know your limits and keep to them, dammit!”

He hisses frantically and attempts to bite her hand, but she won’t let him move his head that far “Ow! Leggo!”

“Say you’re not going to make the same mistake!”

“I won’t make the same mistake!” he snaps at her wrist “Leggo!”

Her grin is manic “I don’t think that was loud enough.”

“You’re right! It was dangerous! I’m dumb! Get off me!”

She releases him momentarily, then sweeps him up into a hug. Giving him a good-natured pat on the back, Sigrun smiles “Don’t think I’m not proud of you, though. Brilliant job.”

“Stop touching me. Please.” manages the mage.

Sigrun raises her arms, allowing Lalli to escape. He beats a swift retreat and takes refuge behind Emil.  
Apparently satisfied that the message has been passed on, Sigrun scratches the back of her head and yawns widely.

“Well, kids, this bastard is what happens when a bunch of Rash-infected people die in a closed-off room. Maybe even in a mass-grave before everyone had a chance to die off.”

“You aren’t making this any easier!” shouts Reynir, sounding just a tad less breathless than he did earlier.

Tuuri is trying very hard not to look at the massive corpse, nor the fragments of the skull on Sigrun’s boots and trousers “So how would we kill one of these things? I mean, without throwing our mage at it. Mages, I guess.” 

“Bullets. Lots and lots of bullets, patience, courage and all that good stuff.”

Furrowing her brow, Tuuri looks at the rifle on Sigrun’s shoulder “Is that really the best strategy there is?”

“That’s generally how we do it on the field, little miss. What were you expecting? Catapults and victory speeches? What the Hel do they teach you in Modern Warfare?”

She shrugs, self-conscious of her lack of information “Mostly about Cleansing.”

“We’re hand-to-hand now, Stubby. Keep that in mind,” Sigrun ruffles her hair affectionately “And smile! We’ve got an exciting night ahead of us. Stand back so I can burn this thing.”

“I think I might just stay here.” says Reynir.

 

 

“So I was twelve years old and new on the job. Not that new- like, maybe a seasoned rookie? I had my own flock for about six months already- but I was still a rookie. Anyway, I was taking them out to graze over by the mountains. That’s basically everywhere where I live. Iceland has mountains all over the place. Seriously, that’s why us Icelanders are so good at running; we already have strong legs from climbing slopes all of our lives.

“It was getting close to twilight when I started to feel like I was being watched. That’s not so unusual when you’re a shepherd. You go out expecting to be attacked because the veteran shepherds have had their fun, and told you about wolves and Slenderman- and I mean the scary one, not the one who was president of Germany before the world got sick- and you’re always wondering when the next horrible monster is going to sneak up on you and take a bite out of your butt. All of those monsters of legend are rattling around in your head, all the time.  
But this time it was really different. I knew there was something really watching me. I knew even back then the difference between being stared at for reals and thinking I was getting a look. You guys know what I mean?”

“Of course!”

“Hel yes I do!”

“Yeah. I mean, I get the creepy-crawly feeling on my back all the time, but it gets like knives when there’s really something getting ready to bite you.”

“What do shepherds have to worry about in Iceland? You guys are totally Rash-free, right?”

“What about angry elk? I once saw one of those mean motherfuckers spear a sheep that got too close on its horns and throw the corpse almost fifteen feet.”

“Shut up, Agneta, no one cares.”

“Well, yeah, but there are…Artic Foxes. They can take a chunk out of your ankles. And sheep are always getting lost and falling in ditches…oh, oh! And there was this shipment of endangered animals coming in, right, in the days before Iceland completely shut down its borders because someone wanted to protect these bears and other things that were on the verge of dying out. So, Iceland says ‘ok go ahead but this is the last time we’re accepting anything from the outside world’, but someone on board got sick and wigged out and wrecked, so we do have a few cougars around. There was also the Reykjavík Family Zoo with some snakes.  
Like, maybe two cougars and a bear from that ship, and one big cobra that's supposed to live in a cave somewhere? So goes the legend. I don’t know- but there are honey badgers!”

“Reynir, honey badgers aren’t real.”

“Onni saw one once.”

“Onni isn’t the most reliable witness when he’s scared, Lalli.”

“Yes he is.”

“No he isn’t.”

“Is.

“Isn’t.”

“Reynir! Get to the part with the svartalf already, before the Hotakainens throw down!”

“Ok, ok. I knew I was being watched, right? And I knew whatever was watching me was going to make a move soon, so I started my sheep heading home. I figured I’d be safer close to home. My parents were in and my father has this rifle he sometimes uses to chase off the odd fox trying to break into the stores. But, like, I’m only about fifteen metres along in my escape when suddenly there’s this shadow in front of us.  
Not right in front of me- about thirty metres away. But it’s definitely blocking my path. And it’s not a human. I can tell straight away, because it’s about eight feet tall and it has these long arms. The shape just wasn’t right. It looked like it was carved from wood.”

“Slenderman!”

“Shut up Malin!”

“Let the man talk!”

“What did you do?”

“Well I had to keep my sheep safe. The dogs were freaking out. One of them was standing in front of me and barking so I couldn’t go forwards. The other two were facing the shadow, but they were whimpering instead. I really didn’t know what to do. 

“So I just kind of sat down. I mean, I wasn’t gonna go charge at something weird and scary like that. And I wasn’t gonna try hiding from it. I knew there was a frost coming at night, and I could have died of the cold if I stayed out that night. I just sat there. The shadow didn’t move either. Not at first. When it did start to move, the dogs all came and sat behind me, whimpering and whining. The sheep, though, they didn’t care. They were all around me munching the grass.

“The shadow walked over to me in these long steps and stopped where the sheep started. I guess they didn’t want to touch the sheep? And I still couldn’t really see a face. That’s when I realised it didn’t really have a face. It had the contours of a face like ours, but there was no way to tell what that face would have looked like. The face was literally made of shadows- like a bunch of people were standing in front of it and blocking all the light, so I only had the vaguest impression of what its face looked like.

“You want to know what the weirdest thing is? The moment I started looking where its eyes probably were, I got this huge nosebleed. Blood started pouring down my front. I honestly thought I’d busted a blood vessel in my brain. But I was too scared to lift my hands to try to stop the flow, because I didn’t want to provoke the monster. So I just sat there with my own blood pooling in my lap, and then I said ‘Please go away’.”

“That’s our Reynir.”

“Well it was a monster of eldritch horror, Tuuri, I didn’t want to see what would happen if I hurt its feelings with bad manners. You want to know what the weirdest thing was, though? The moment I asked it to go away, it turned around and strode off. Then I realised I was glowing!”

“Glowing!”

“Glowing?”

“Yeah! I was glowing from the inside out! I’d gotten so scared I started to glow. I think I must have been casting a basic protective spell. One of those instances of my latent abilities floating to the surface to protect me, right Lalli? Lalli? No- oh, you’re nodding. Ok. Yes, so, anyway, I was glowing. I think that scared me more than anything else. As soon as the thing vanished into the dark, I got up and ran home. The sheep all followed me and the dogs beat me home. 

“Half of my neighbours were at the house when I got there. A lot of them had seen me running and thought I was some kind of spirit or, I don’t know, a wild-fire that grew legs. I tried telling them what had happened to me, but everyone was distracted by my glowing. My parents had me go sit in the shed because I was so bright I was burning peoples’ eyes. Everyone was so distracted by the discovery that I was a mage- like, a proper powerful one that needed to go to an academy- no one wanted to hear about what set me off. They thought the nosebleed was just stress from me glowing or something.

“I only figured out what it was that almost got me when my oldest brother came home. I told him all about it, and he told me that he’d lost a colleague to something like it. He told me it was a svartalf.”

“Oh come on!”

“Really, Reynir? I almost believed you.”

“Yeah, svartalf are about as real as honey badgers!”

“I’ve seen one.”

“Mikkela, No you haven’t.”

“How do you know? You haven’t been around for every second of my life. I’ve seen a lot of weird things without you. I swear, I saw a svartalf. It was up in Östersund, actually, when I was doing some work for the Council. It was almost exactly like you described Reynir, except it wasn’t interested in me at all. It was just moseying past when I saw it. I used the First Rule, of course, and it passed me by completely.”

“Sounds like your romantic career.”

“Wow, brother, that was rude. Fight me.”

“No. You’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk! Fight me! We’re gonna find out who’s the best twin, right here, right now!”

“Hey, Mikkela, go easy on him. We need him one piece for tomorrow’s mission. And don’t tear him apart in front of his students. That shit’s traumatising- whoa! Hey, hey, no faces, you guys! Don’t go for the eyes!”

“Someone run up to the hall and tell everyone the big Dane twins are killing each other! This is too good to miss!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reynir's panic attack is based on an actual experience I had where I had to get off my bike, lie down in the middle of a children's playground and find animal-shapes in the clouds.


	11. Field-work

Something about watching Mikkel tussle in the snow with his twin made Lalli suddenly very, very homesick. Whispering to Emil that he was going to take a walk, he slinks away from the camp-fire and starts to cast himself about. The equivalent of stretching his spiritual arms in preparation for tracking Onni down.  
He isn’t that far from home this time. If he can just make his voice loud enough, he should be able to find Onni in a matter of minutes. Besides, Onni told him he would be listening out for him. If he wanted to talk to him, or something.

Finding their storage shed/ room is a trick in the dark, being as tired as he is. There were many introductions and slaps on the back and just too much human contact in general when they sat around the campfire. The two Generals were over-joyed, for some unfathomable reason, to see him and asked far too many questions about Finland and his magic.  
Even worse, he couldn’t take comfort or strength or whatever from Emil’s reassuring presence, since he ended up knee-deep in scarred Norwegians that wanted to look at his new scar. That was definitely the worst part.

Lalli shoulders the door open and immediately trips over the cat.

“Dammit.” he picks himself up “You’re trying to kill me.”

The cat blinks slowly and flicks her whiskers at him. Confirmation of her evil plot. 

Lalli collapses on the first bed he bumps into in the dark. Going by the long hair that immediately tangles around his wrist, this is Reynir’s bed. Reynir won’t mind, though. He likes it when other people use his things and take advantage of him; he calls it ‘helping’.

As he hopes, Lalli has only to fall asleep to find Onni. He sits up, stretches and steps off his raft. And immediately runs into a solid wall of muscle and fluff. Lalli doesn’t bother to step back to see if it’s his cousin; he reaches up and squeezes the chin of the person he has just run into. Definitely Onni’s shovel-chin.

“Get off,” Onni bats him away patiently “That was fast, by the way.”

“Was it?”

“I thought I would have to wait for much longer.”

“You don’t.”

Onni sits down at the edge of the pond and gestures for Lalli to do the same “Don’t think I didn’t notice, by the way.”

Lalli narrows his eyes “What?”

“I noticed you using your luonto.”

“Are you watching me?”

“Of course I’m watching you. How else am I going to make sure you don’t do something stupid? I cannot believe you-”

“Don’t. Sigrun already lectured me. And punished me.”

He cocks an eyebrow “What, now Sigrun is the expert on how to discipline a mage?”

“She told me not to do it again. What else are you gonna do? Apart from cry on me.”

Sighing, Onni rubs his temples “I’m not going to cry. Can you be a little less hostile?”

“Sorry. I’m just…just tired.”

“And I’m terrified for both of you. You’re out in the middle of Norwegian bum-fuck nowhere and I have no idea what those crazy soldiers are going to do with you-”

“They’re taking us on a mission tomorrow.”

Onni lowers his hand to his hands “Oh, gods. Ok. No, that’s ok. I wanted this for you, didn’t I?”

Lalli considers patting him on the shoulder. He does not.  
“We’ll be safe. Emil’s done this before.”

Onni snorts “Well if Emil can survive it than everyone can.”

They sit in silence for a few moments. Well, as silent as the dream-space gets. There are still breezes in the trees and something bubbling gently at the bottom of the pond. Lalli once stuck his head in the water to see what he would find and has regretted doing so ever since.  
Picking up a flat stone, Onni cocks his hand back and skips the stone at least ten times across the surface of the pond. It jumps right over the raft into the centre and then back out again, without so much as faltering, and makes it over to the other side.

“Remember Saimaa? You were tiny. I don’t think you would remember, but-”

“You taught me to skip stones on the lake. You said it was the first magic trick you’d ever teach me.”

Onni smiles, caught off guard by Lalli’s unusually accurate memory. Normally, his favourite cousin doesn’t care to even remember what his own surname is without being told or having it written on a nametag pinned to his chest “You were only four, but you got so good at it.” the smile fades, and his expression grows wistful “You pick up things so fast. Magic comes to you so naturally. You learned your conversational Icelandic before we had a chance to make you learn it, you remember that? Just by listening to the traders and the soldiers on the docks argue with each other. Gods- you cussed like a sailor at first, though. It was so embarrassing.”

Lalli is confused and slightly alarmed; Onni never does this. He never talks about the past or how they used to be. Much less about Saimaa. In fact, since not one word about Saimaa has passed Onni’s lips since they left the place, Lalli kind of assumed he had forgotten all about it.

“Am I dying?”

“What?”

“Are you dying? Is one of us sick?”

Onni looks at him funny “No, Lalli. We’re all healthy.”

“Oh.”

“Because I never talk about Saimaa, right?”

He nods.

They are quiet for a moment. Just staring at the still surface of the pond, occasionally skipping a rock across it to make some ripples. It feels like a healthy silence, though, not those awkward or stiff ones they usually share when Onni cannot think of anything to say and Lalli doesn’t want to talk.

“You can tell Tuuri her little piece of trickery paid off.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going on that expedition. My mask is going to have to be glued to my mouth the entire time, but they need experienced mages. And guess what I am?”

“Um, a-”

“If you mention crying I’m going to be mad.”

But he ruffles Lalli’s hair affectionately. It is at moments like these were social cues are really just confusing messes for Lalli.

 

In the end, both of their teachers come along. Mikkel hasn’t been in the field for about two years and does not seem overly-eager to remedy that, but Mikkela was, and, of course, Sigrun just about tore off into the Silent World without them. He had to come along to make sure his sister and field-trip partner were going to come back in one piece. Or at least a relative whole, with any bits that did end up falling off being small enough to stitch back on.

Tuuri is so excited she can barely contain herself. She and Sigrun are chattering excitedly about things Sigrun has seen in the Silent World, while Sigrun’s soldiers hover around them in a little boisterous cloud and chuckle over how damned cute green-horns can be.  
Emil and Lalli are lagging slightly behind this group of soldiers. Mikkela walks with them and has yet to notice her one-sided conversation about her job and how bloody ineffective the Council can be is one-sided. Neither of the boys are talking. Neither of them seem to mind not talking.

Meanwhile, Mikkel is doing his best to keep Reynir from having a melt-down.  
His first strategy was to give Reynir the cat to hold. Incidentally, they ended up bringing along Kitty, and she needed to be carried until Sigrun gave the order to unleash her in all her fluffy wrath upon any smells to be smelled in the forest. 

It works, at first, until it stops working as Reynir realises how close he has come to having to step outside of the gates.

He looks pleadingly at Mikkel “Do I have to?”

Mikkel nods “You are safe.”

“Promise?”

He thinks about it for a moment “I promise to fling my gigantic body in the way of whatever might try to cause you harm.”

Reynir is very touched by this. His eyes shining, he hugs Mikkel around his substantial middle (somehow managing to reach all the way around, with his lanky arms) and squeezes, briefly and affectionately “You’re the best teacher ever.”

“I know.”

Ahead of them, Mikkela complains about the pension planning to a deaf audience, and further ahead still are Sigrun and Tuuri, finally becoming serious as the gate is opened, and finally discussing the specifics of the mission.

“The hunt is not going to be a pleasant one.”

“Are any hunts pleasant?” counters Tuuri with a nervous laugh “Because if they are, I was mislead about what a hard job this will be.”

The inside of her mask fogs as her breathing grows erratic and laboured; they have passed beyond the gate again.

“Oh yeah, it’s a hard job,” one of the soldiers assures her- a man called Ingolfr, of about fifty, which makes him close to death from Tuuri’s perspective “You think I woulda got me all these lovely scars if this job were as easy as turning a page in school?”

To reinforce his point, he ungloves one hand and wave three stumps in her face.  
Tuuri is about to object- excuse him, but school is just as challenging, be it in a very different way- but Emil interrupts her and dissolves the tension somewhat by stumbling over his own feet.

Hearing the squeal of indignant distress, everyone turns to watch Lalli catch him by the collar. Emil is swallowed up in the depths of his coat. For a split second, Lalli is absolutely horrified and seems to think he has either witnessed his friend being consumed by some kind of coat-troll, or accidentally beheaded him.

Then Emil swears in his own language, struggling, and the relief on Lalli’s face is transcendent.

Sigrun snorts and shoulders her rifle “None of that fairy-footing around when we’re in the woods, alright?”

“Alright!” comes Emil’s muffled response from the depths of his prison “Can- can someone get me out of here? I can’t breathe- ow! Lalli, you’re pulling my hair!”

“Sorry.”

Another of the soldiers, this time, a huge woman whose name completely escapes Tuuri, but whose permanently sullen expression frightens the daylights out of her, decides to speak up “Are these really the best the Academy has to offer?”

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow; she doesn’t enjoy being challenged very much, especially in front of her crew “The best, no, but they are by far the most promising.”

At the back of the group, Reynir lets out a slightly hysterical giggle.  
“Hear that, Kitty? Apparently I’m promising. Not, you know, a giant, hairy liability.”

The woman jabs a thumb at Reynir “Are you sure? That kid looks more like he’s the most panicky out of the entire Academy.”  
If the woman notices the three filthy glares trained on her as well as the icy one from Reynir’s other teacher, she gives no indication of it affecting her.

“Reynir? Got a great head on his shoulders. Great braid too. He’s entitled to his first freak-out on his first patrol. Honestly, tell me right now, who out of the people here hasn’t had some kind of massive panic attack because of a patrol or a battle? And don’t lie. I’ve known most of you for most of your careers.”

A lot of hands are raised. Some tentatively, some without shame of any kind.  
Even the twins are putting their hands up. Reynir looks at Mikkel in shock and mouths ‘really?’, to which he gets ‘yes, but unlike you I cried and threw up’.

With that issue resolved, Sigrun fixes the woman with a look. When Tuuri tries to describe it later in letters to her brother, she cannot find the right words to fit it. It was the kind of look the leader of the mythical wolf-pack alpha might aim at one of its mythical brethren if it caught it acting out of hand. Tuuri expects the woman’s name, whatever it might be, will soon join Sigrun’s growing list of possible mutineers.

 

The noises start to come after they have walked about a kilometre. Tuuri expected that they would be plunging into the snowy forest to do the hunting, but figured out that the visibility would be terrible. On top of that, anything the squad lit on fire would be just as much a risk to them as the trolls, what, with the unfortunate tendency of trees to be flammable.  
If they went into a forest each time they did a hunt, they would also start a small forest-fire.

At one point during the walking, Tuuri turned to a younger man beside her and asked “So the plan is just to talk and make noise until the trolls come from the forest to us?”

The man nodded, but was quizzical “What noise are you talking about?”

At that point, someone behind them burped loudly and artfully, sending the rest of the soldiers into roaring laughter.  
Since the man didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about, Tuuri dropped it and went to walk beside her cousin.

Emil takes that as his cue to make himself scarce, to let the Finns have some Finnish time, and good-naturedly elbows a few people out of the way to get next to Sigrun.

“So this time we do use guns, right?”

“Right.” she’s beaming already “That scar looks great, by the way.”

“It’s a memory of a traumatic injury, not an accessory.”

“Eh. Steg-än, steg-en.”

Not long after, there is the noise of something crunching its way through the underbrush. The group stops as one. A rasp of rifles sliding from holsters and knives from sheaths. Emil takes his flame-thrower off his shoulder and braces the butt against his shoulder, waiting for something to aim at. Lalli shuffles behind him, squinting over his shoulder with a palm on Emil’s back. If one of them is shocked, the reaction will give the other a heart attack.

“Listen to that,” says Sigrun to Tuuri “Just listen to that.”

Tuuri does not have to strain to hear the faint noise; it is clearly getting closer and closer “What is it?”

“Tell me what you think.”

“It’s…it’s heavy.”

“And so?”

“And so it must be large. With a lot of heads.”

“Good job, fuzzy. You must have been listening in your classes.”

Mikkel materialises at Sigrun’s shoulder and speaks under his breath “What are you intending for them to do, exactly, apart from be traumatised?”

“What did you do with Reynir?”

“I left him in the very capable hands of my twin.”

“Charming. You know he’s going to die-”

“Like we all do. You want to maybe stand back? And take fuzzy with you?”

Tuuri protests, though her heart has climbed into her mouth and every bit of her is trembling with the anticipation and the fear of what is coming for her “I can fight. I should fight. Why’d you give me a rifle if you didn’t want me to fight?”

“I do. Just from the back, where it’s safer. And Mikkel, send me up the blondie.”

Tuuri retreats, unsure if she should be reluctant or grateful to her teacher. Sigrun probably knows best; she’s the Captain of all these seasoned, scarred soldiers for a reason which does not have to do with dumb luck or charisma. 

“Sigrun wants you,” she whispers to Emil as she passes him “No, Lalli, not you. Stay put.”

He doesn’t listen, obviously. Never does listen to Tuuri about doing one thing when he could be doing the other thing with Emil. Tuuri is beginning to think she has been replaced as Lalli’s confidante. 

A moment later, when the troll shrugs its way out of the shivering tree-line, Tuuri finds herself very glad to have been put at the back.  
Her knees go weak, but she manages to stay on her feet. She plants herself firmly on the snow and levels her rifle, determined not to miss should she be told to fire.

The troll is a mess. A mess of limbs, of misplaced heads and a few things that do not even look to belong to human anatomy.  
Three heads are easy to see; one sticking out of what appears to be the armpit of a massive arm, which is being used to propel the troll along he ground. Another mounted on the top of the mass of lolloping flesh with a few too many eyes. The last grunts in the middle of a grey expanse of flesh where the troll’s mouth snaps open and shut. It seems to be serving as some kind of tonsil.

“Oh my gods.” whispers Reynir. 

Kitty fluffs up in his hands and hisses. She springs out of his collar and gallops to the front of the line, stopping at Sigrun’s heels. Her back is arched. Her tail is rigidly upright, and her muzzle, folded in a snarl.

Sigrun looks much the same “Rifles, on your mark. Concentrate fire on the visible heads. Cleansers- cleanser…we seem to have forgotten Johan at the base, so, uh, Emil, on your mark. Get that tonsil-thingie at the back of the mouth and get it good.”

Mikkel elbows Tuuri gently in the side, indicating that she should fire. She puts her finger on the trigger and takes a deep, steadying breath.  
The practice dummies they use at the school for target practice? Not a patch on the real thing. There is no way straw and cloth could ever come close to the true horror of what they’re really going to be facing when graduation comes in three years and disgorges them into the real world.

Sigrun raises her hand, open.

“When she closes it, shoot.” advises Mikkel.

The troll lumbers forwards. Sigrun closes her hand.


	12. Graduation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the last chapter. Thanks for the support, the advice, the doodles and catching the myriad little mistakes that peppered this fic. It's been a pleasure to write this.

Emil is the first to shoot. The troll rears back with a face-full of flame, letting out a multi-howl of rage. Its rearing body is an excellent target for the soldiers. Every single one of them gets off a shot. Tuuri feels a small thrill of satisfaction, mixed with a potent dash of horror, as she sees her own shot produce a spray of blood from one of the temples.  
Ok, so it is not what she was aiming for. But it still counts! And she may have even killed her first troll-head? Excellent. This is going better than she hoped it might.

The troll blunders forward.

“Split formation!” orders Sigrun.

She grabs Lalli by his collar and hauls him to the side, as the rest of the group splits down the middle. Tuuri finds herself with Mikkel and Reynir on the opposite side to her cousin. She is surprised and pleased for Reynir that he actually manages to move- she was concerned for a moment that his terror might make him forget how to walk.

Now, the troll moves down an aisle of hunters. Each rifle is trained on it and shot again and again. The troll falls flat on its back well before it reaches the end of the short aisle.

On the other side, Lalli is wondering if he really did hear the snippet of his own language he thinks he did. A small child’s voice, complaining of a sting. A sting like a bee, it said, a burning bee, and it was beseeching its mother to help it because the bee had stung it in the eye.  
He has not shot yet. He does not like rifles, nor do they like him. But, as he stares at the melted and sizzling remains of the troll’s many faces, he thinks he has a fair guess at which hunter exactly might have been the source of the child’s complaint.

Emil does not hear it. He’d look troubled if he heard it.

Instead, he just looks glad they have finished it off.

He turns to Lalli, asking “Are you alright?”

Lalli nods “Nicely done.”

“I guess so…I think I may have scorched Sigrun a little bit.”

Sigrun is not in the position to tell him if he has; she’s got some orders to give out.

“Alright, soldiers, this is what we’re doing. We have reports of nine Giants, two smaller grosslings and one of those big stalky things with the brain sac on top of it. What are we calling those?”

“Murderpops!” calls someone from the back.

“Muderpops! That’s the one. This morning’s report puts the lone Murderpop down as a straggler, left behind by its herd, so it should be an easy kill. The Giants are travelling in twos and threes. The two smaller grosslings might be about to start a nest, so I want those two taken care of with extreme prejudice, and the environment where they were found wants a thorough investigation as well. Understood?”

“Understood.” is chorused back at her so enthusiastically, Emil fancies he sees her hair being blown back.

From there, she divides her soldiers up into groups.

Reynir, Mikkel and Tuuri are attached to a larger group of five soldiers- Sigrun thought it best to separate the twins, given last night’s events. Mikkela is relegated to another group on her own, which she doesn’t seem to mind. This leaves Sigrun with Lalli and Emil, and the woman who terrified Tuuri earlier.  
Naturally, they will be hunting a Giant.

Two Giants, in fact, but Sigrun is expected to be able to take down one on her own. She still holds the national record for the number of Giants killed single-handedly, which is somewhere in the low hundreds. Sigrun suspects she miscounted once or twice, so it is likely even more than that.

“Stay close to Mikkel,” is her parting order to Tuuri and Reynir “And I promise, you’ll be fine. He’ll fling his gigantic corpse in between you and anything that tries to hurt you.”

She ruffles Tuuri’s hair fondly, claps Reynir on the shoulder (not wanting to stretch to reach the top of his head, and thusly reveal Reynir has actually managed to surpass her in height in his latest growth spurt) and punches Mikkel gently on his shoulder, telling him to be vigilant and badass.  
He promises he will be a vigilant badass and tells her to watch where she steps.

Sigrun takes them deeper into the woods. The voices of the other groups are quickly lost in the muffling effect of the snow. Within a few moments, they seem to be the only four people on the earth. Emil is not sure how feels about being so close to the scary woman, whose name he doesn’t know.  
She’s quite scary. 

But Sigrun talks to her like she would anyone else “Have you seen the crop of Giants that turned up this year? Gods almighty, they’re big, old tough bastards. From the very first batch of the infected, I’d say.”

Emil knows he should be listening. Valuable experience and all that, but he cannot feign an interest in what they’re saying.

“Lalli? What’s wrong?”

Lalli doesn’t seem to know. Drawing his cloak tighter about him, he shrugs “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“No. Whatever’s wrong is gonna stay wrong no matter where I am.”

Lalli logic. Emil has found it is often the logic that is the most, you know, logical, once you manage to translate it. He has had plenty of practice in translation, so he understands what his friend is saying.  
And it unnerves him.

Something will go wrong today. Lalli can feel it and now, so can he.

“It’s alright.”

Lalli gives him that look. That ‘what the heck are you talking about you mysterious Swede’ look Emil has come to know and love. Lalli has a slightly different look for everyone.  
For Tuuri, it’s the wide-eyed, unashamed ‘what, do I embarrass you dear cousin?’ stare. For Reynir, it’s a bewildered, slightly wary squint that seems to say ‘there goes that braided weirdo again’, and Sigrun’s is the most complicated for the equal parts of disdain and affection, something along the lines of ‘you scare me but I like you anyway because you’re weirder than me’.

As for Mikkel, Lalli just kind of regards him as a large, harmless person. The way one might think of a tamed bear; aware that there are claws that could disembowel him with a flick of the brawny wrist, but also completely unconcerned by this.

He grins at Lalli “Don’t give me that look. We’ll be fine. Sigrun is here to protect us.”

“No she isn’t!” calls Sigrun over her shoulder “Sigrun is here to do her job!”

“Which includes protecting innocents!” Emil shoots back “Seriously, Lalli, if it would make you feel better to turn back we can. We’re going to be here for a long time. You’ll have plenty of other days to do your mage thing.”

“I’m fine. I can do my…mage thing…today.”

Whatever that might entail. So far, Lalli’s magic has only served to create an oppressive, creepy atmosphere around him that has even the most seasoned warriors (Sigrun’s dad, Mr General included) giving him a wide berth. Reynir thinks it’s hysterical, for some reason.

 

They walk along in silence for a little while. Sigrun and the scary woman continue talking ahead of them. The conversation flows easily from memory to memory. Kill to kill. The woman is obviously another fan of Sigrun’s, going by the way her scary eyes are glinting like a child that has just been handed a chunk of candy they don’t have to share.

“…seen a troll like that whip bastard in a long time. It means some of the oldest batches are being driven out, like I said. I’m worried we might get some from the zoo.”

“The zoo?” repeats the woman quizzically.

Emil listens in; he has no idea what Sigrun means either.

Stretching her arms above her head, Sigrun squints through the canopy of the branches over their heads. She seems to be looking for a looming face between the leaves, or something else similarly atrocious.  
“The zoo. Whatever. There was this bunch of foreign animals around here when the world went down the drain. So sometimes we get a weird breed of troll, where a human-ish troll absorbed an animal-ish troll and they make monsters like that massive thing we just saw. That was something like a giraffe and a flock of those weird pink birds- Emil, what are those weird pink birds called?”

“Why do you think I’d know?”

“You’re the one with the classical education.”

“Flamingos.” mutters Lalli.

He doesn’t bother to ask how or why Lalli knows this “They’re called flamingos. And by the way, a classical education means I know who old artists are, alright? Not the names of every animal ever.”

Sigrun waves dismissively “That’s nice.” and returns to her talk with the scary woman.

Emil is about to thank Lalli for throwing him a lifeline when the Finn flinches, like he’s been struck, and shrinks into Emil’s side.

“What?”

“What.”

“What?” Emil hears himself getting shrill “What are you what-ing me for? Why are you freaking out?”

Sigrun calls over her shoulder “Boys! What are you doing?”

“I’m not sure?”

“There’s something here.” says Lalli.

Sigrun knows enough about him by now to take him seriously “What’s here?”

Again, he shrugs “I don’t know.”

“Can you guess?”

“Something big. Bad.”

The scary woman snorts “There’s something I never would have figured out on my own.”

A look from Sigrun silences her “Lalli, stay calm. Remember you’re in a safe space right now-”

“I’m in a forest full of monsters.” he counters without humour.

“Yeah, but you’re in the forest with me. Your teacher. I’m not gonna let anything bad happen to you. If I can help it.”

 

A little ways away, Reynir is having similar troubles. He opened his mouth to tell Mikkel he thinks his heart rate is just starting to return to normal, but what comes out instead surprises even him.  
“We’re in trouble.”

Mikkel takes him seriously, for some reason “Why?”

Reynir gestures helplessly around them. They have just stopped at the corpse of a deer which is so fresh the blood still steams in the snow. The moment he saw it, he got a bad feeling. Now that feeling has blown itself up into a full-on foreboding, and Reynir has become convinced they are all about to be taught a lesson in terror.

Tuuri, on the other hand, is poking at the deer curiously with a stick one of the soldiers gave to her to do exactly that.

“I don’t know. We just are.”

“There’s not much I can do with that, Reynir.”

“Oh. I know…I just thought you should know.”

Mikkel pats him on the top of the head. It’s been a while since someone has done that; most people get embarrassed when they have to strain to reach the top of his head and stop halfway.

 

A little bit further away than before, Lalli is still nervous. So nervous, in fact, it has changed from a simple case of a nerves to a full on defensive state. Emil tries once to tug him along and when he finds him immovable, he stops and calls Sigrun and the scary woman back.

“He’s really not liking this.” he says.

Sigrun notes this grimly “Alright, we’re stopping. Something’s up today.”

The woman protests vehemently “Wait, wait, you want to stop a hunt that we really need to get done just because some green horn mage is scared? That’s ridiculously bad judgement.”

Flashing her a cool smile, Sigrun moves to stand beside Lalli “So is not listening to your captain. Keep in mind I trained this twig here, and I know he’s strong enough to know what he’s talking about when something scares him. He’s scared. He wants to stop. That’s enough incentive for me.”

Lalli mumbles something under his breath that might be a thanks, or that might be him asking her to get out of his personal space.

He is spared from having to explain himself, as at that moment, there is a loud, startling snap behind them. Not the sound of a twig underfoot. It’s more like an entire tree falling over.

 

Tuuri drops the stick and straightens up “What was that?”

“Sounded like a log getting stepped on,” says one of the soldiers “Something’s coming this way, I think. We better get into position-”

She never gets to finish her suggestion; a shard of grey bone sprouts from the back of her throat and passes through easily, like a knife in butter, but with the sound of flesh being torn in two as it if it were a sheet of paper. Tuuri gets to see it all, but Reynir hardly sees anything; Mikkel slaps a hand over his eyes and tucks him under an arm protectively. But he can still see a little. He can see the woman’s body from the chest down, and sees her body being lifted into the air. Her boots twitch in an approximation of a gallows’ dance.

Belatedly, Reynir notices Kitty is a fluffed with fear.

Springing from his arms, she charges through the legs of the soldiers, who are already reeling back in preparation for their retaliation. A shrill voice screams the woman’s name. Some other soldier has done the charitable thing and grabbed Tuuri by the collar, flinging her towards Mikkel, who catches her by the arm smoothly.

“There’s blood on me.”

He wipes his sleeve across her forehead “You’re fine. Let me see your mask.”

No cracks- he deflates a little.  
Tuuri goes under the other arm, but she wields her rifle with determination. She isn’t backing down from this fight.

The gory prize hangs over the heads of her team-mates. Whatever’s attached to the spear of flexing, coiling bone is still shrouded in the leaves and snow, but it is advancing. The body swings over the group. Droplets of blood are showered down on all of them, save for Reynir, who Mikkel covers with half of his open jacket.

“Can you fight?” he says in Reynir’s ear.

Reynir realises this might be the most terrified he will ever be in his life. And that he’s kind of over it now. It’s all well and good to be afraid, but will that get him home to his loving family of worry warts? No it will not. A rifle, however.

“Give me something to shoot it with.”

 

The tree-line shivers. A flock of birds sprays from the trees, their cries frightened and indignant.

“Any idea what it is?” asks Sigrun, rather calmly for a person who’s about to be faced with some unimaginable horror.

“It’s in pain.”

“Ok, that clears it up. Thanks.” she draws her rifle and pulls back the hammer, waiting for her target.

She does not have to wait that long. They loom from the shadows. At first, disembodied, glowing orbs, floating towards them as if spores on a swift wind. Sigrun doesn’t wait to see the legs- she shoots the first one and it bursts, sullenly, reluctantly, and sends a huge wave of foul-smelling fluid in every direction.  
The brainstem and the eyes floating in the centre sag, like the twisted filament of a light-bulb which has just blown.

“That’s not good.”

Emil takes aim with his own rifle “Why is that not good?”

“Normally they aren’t so weak. That was a warning shot. To kill one of these things, you have to burn them. They shouldn’t just-” she pops another one. The sound of the body crunching into the snow and pine-litter is sickening “Explode like that.”

“Ew.” observes Lalli, quite astutely.

The scary woman fires off a shot, but this time her bullet doesn’t pierce the membrane of the advancing troll. It pushes the face in, like a finger pushing into an especially thick jam, then springs back out again. The troll sways on its feet and bumps into a tree with a distinct ‘splamp’.

“Wait, wait, why isn’t it good? Why is it bad?”

“Because those things only pop when they’re concentrating on something else. Lower your weapons, everyone. They’re not coming for us.”

Emil only lowers his rifle when he sees Sigrun do it. She winds an arm around his shoulder and pulls him close, then has to catch Lalli by the collar and kind of head-lock him with her elbow. Though the scary woman doesn’t try to get in on the Sigrun-hug action, she does stick close.

The long-legged trolls thunder past. Around them, their massive legs stabbing the snow to the left and right and front and back of them. Always just missing. Emil misses a lot of it; at a certain point, he can no longer bear to watch the trolls coming for him, to torture himself with trying to guess which might be the one to kill him, and he hides his face in Sigrun’s shoulder.

Lalli doesn’t even blink once. It kind of hurts, but he’s not going to take the chance.

When the last of them has blundered out of their way and is following the rest of the herd, Lalli reaches around Sigrun and pokes Emil’s cheek to let him know it’s ok to open his eyes.

Sigrun lets out a deep, shuddering breath and pats both of them on the head “Good job boys. Stayed calm under fire. So, like I was saying, those trolls mostly concentrate their energy on defending their heads. Big sacs of fluid, you know? Basically gigantic targets, so they gotta make their membranes tough. It’s why they move so slow. When that type of troll gets scared and has to run, its membrane goes soft.”

Emil doesn’t dare ask it, so Lalli does: “What scared it?”

“Same thing that’s scared you, probably.”

The scary woman adds her two cents “Doesn’t take much to spook those things. Doesn’t take much to spook a green-horn.”

 

“What the hell is that?”

The troll lies at their feet, freshly dead and looking a little bit like Reynir’s childhood trousers, what, with all of the holes bored through the troll with the rough play.  
Mikkel can’t look up- he’s too busy peeling the dead soldier off of the tongue-barb-thing with another soldier’s help, so it falls to Tuuri to invest what the Hel Reynir’s chatting about now.

“What?”

“That.” he points at the top of the trees a little ways away.

Right on cue, a line of bobbing, bulbous, silvery heads run past. They wobble frantically from side to side, disturbing birds as they go. The sound of the stalk-legs trampling the undergrowth gives everyone pause. 

“What are they running away from?” demands one of the soldiers, as if one of the others is keeping a secret “Can anyone see it?”

Tuuri and Reynir each add to the chorus of ‘nope’s that goes up. Mikkel swears under his breath as the corpse finally pops off the barb, leaving a good part of her throat still speared.

“I don’t like this.” says Tuuri.

Kitty doesn’t like it either; she has forgotten most of her training and scaled half of Reynir’s leg in an effort to dive back into the safety of his collar. She would be there already, if Reynir’s legs weren’t so damned long. 

“I need to find my cousin.”

Reynir doesn’t like that idea. Wandering off into the woods? With foul things afoot and other things besides? With something creating the sensation of a corpse’s hand on his back and one of them already dead?  
He doesn’t like that idea at all.

He dislikes the idea of Lalli, Emil and Sigrun facing that on their own even more.

“Mikkel!” he calls, scooping the cat down his shirt “We gotta go!”

“Don’t you dare, young man.” there’s the teacher voice; Mikkel is still busy getting the corpse wrapped up to carry back to the compound. He doesn’t have time for Reynir’s nonsense right now.

Reynir’s mouth spreads in a crazy grin before he can stop it “Catch me if you can.”

He sets off, amazed that he’s actually able to move his legs. But he supposes he’s done with being scared, the way he did.

“Reynir!” barks Tuuri “You’re being stupid!”

“And you’re both in detention until Ragnarok!” adds Mikkel.

From the sound of his voice, he’s hot on Tuuri’s heels.

This is fine with Reynir. He has a vague idea of where Lalli is- he can feel the mage’s aura, sparking, spoiling for a fight less than a kilometre away.

 

“Go back to the compound, right now,” order Sigrun “We’re on the verge of something bad. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad.”

“I’m not moving.” says Emil in a tone of voice that leaves no room for argument.

“Me either.” echoes Lalli.

Sigrun tries to look stern and it comes out grateful “Alright, if I can’t persuade you. You, soldier, you get your butt back to base and mobilise everyone. The Generals- I mean everyone.”

Scary woman doesn’t need to be told twice. Her retreating back is not so scary, anymore, and suddenly Emil is surprised he was afraid of her at all.  
He is the one, after all, with the wicked scar. The badge of experience.

And the mage at his side who’s going to do everything he can to protect him. Emil and Lalli need to talk about that, if they survive whatever is coming. It’s not a good idea to keep feelings like the stuff Emil’s got, and hopefully, vice versa, not for too long, anyway.

With this little incentive to get through the next battle alive, Emil hands over his rifle to Lalli “I don’t need this.”

As he levels the flame-thrower, Sigrun has to grin “It’s just not Emil if it’s not on fire, huh?”

“Nope.”

“GUYS!” roars Reynir from behind them.

His appearance is so sudden, he is nearly shot, burnt and decapitated by an invisible force all at once. Fortunately, Sigrun and Emil miss, and Lalli stops his luonto just in time. 

“Are you ok?”

Sigrun is livid and overjoyed at the same time “Reynir! I almost shot you in your stupid freckled face! What are you doing here, you dumb ass?”

“He’s getting chased.” pants Tuuri, appearing out of the screen of leaves “Hoo- oh my gods, no, I still can’t run. Oh, Lalli, thank the gods, you’re ok.”

She stumbles over to her cousin and half-hugs him, half-falls on him. Lalli bears it.

Finally, out comes Mikkel. He has not broken a sweat. He just looks mad as a hornet, but this changes when Sigrun slaps him on the shoulder.

“Thank Odin. Got some back-up. Where the Hel are the others?”

“Back there. Someone had to catch Reynir.” Mikkel shakes his head, giving Reynir a very disappointed look “But his legs were a tad too long to be matched in stride, so here we are.”

“Great. Here it comes.”

Lalli points at something no one can see yet. Rifles are cocked. The flame-thrower burps a preliminary flame as Emil primes it and readies himself for what is likely to be the biggest fire-fight of his life. Kitty hisses, thinking along the same lines.

“Not too late to run, kids.” says Sigrun.

She means it.

“In fact, it would be best if you did.” adds Mikkel.

He means it even more.

The four of them scoff in a perfect unison.

“No way.” grins Tuuri.

“You taught us better than that.” says Reynir.

“It’s either this or standing still and staying silent.” adds Lalli.

Emil gets the last word in and the first shot off, as the creature emerges from the shadows “Besides, that’s not how we were trained.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, as it turns out, we don't actually get to know who the Major Character Death tag is for? I know, it's kind of a bull-caca tactic, but when it came time to do it I couldn't actually go through with it.  
> The original ending called for Sigrun to die in her students' arms while Mikkel had to set off in the woods on his own to track down Mikkela (whom we shall assume is alive and well and kicking troll ass), but I found that as I drew closer to the ending, it just didn't seem like the ending I had been working to all along. The ending I wanted involved team-work and a shared regard for each other coming to a head. I wanted to see the students remembering their training and their teachers being proud, so I kind of just threw away the original ending and indulged.
> 
> Sorry about that, but I like the way it turned out. Hopefully, it's not such a bad ending after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Well that was our introduction there. I took some liberties with Sigrun's back-story, but I can't imagine I'm that far off in terms of how early she started killing things.
> 
> Hope to see you all at the next chapter.


End file.
